Morning fire

Bad News, Good News and Reading Material

2008-09-12T14:59:00.006+09:00

Assassination of Iraqi writer Kamil Shayya Abdallah

Unknown gunmen assassinated the Iraqi writer Kamil Shayya Abdallah, adviser to the minister of culture, on Muhammad al-Qasim Street in central Baghdad on Saturday 23 August, 2008. Security sources explained that "unidentified gunmen opened fire using pistols with silencers on his car, the source added that "the accident occurred at about 15:00 local time (12:00 GMT), and Shayyaa was transferred to the hospital before he died there." And the sources confirmed that "his driver was seriously wounded" and was rushed to hospital.

Shayya was a well known researcher and writer and literary critic; he was appointed an adviser in the Ministry of Culture since 2003 after the changes which affected the country and worked with the three ministers who occupied the post of Minister of Culture and they are respectively: Mufeed Al-Jazaeri, Nouri Al-Rawi, Asa'd Hashemi and Finally, with Maher al-Hadithi.

Shayya who was resident in Belgium before the fall of the regime, is one of the most prominent supporters of establishing a new cultural trend in Iraq to be in accordance with open secular aspects.

The deceased was born in the city of Nasiriya (375 km south of Baghdad) in 1951 and worked in the field of translation and writing of literary and cultural researches. He was a member of the Political Bureau of the Iraqi Communist Party and one of the most prominent writers and editors of the (Al-Thaqafa Al-Jadeeda "New Culture") magazine issued by the Communist Party. He worked for it 1970s, before leaving the country for political reasons.

IraqSlogger.com reported that Shayya's death has had consequences in the Iraqi intellectual world:

A few weeks ago, an assassination in Baghdad took the life of a high-level official
in the Ministry of Culture: Iraqi academic Kamil Shayya'. Little interest was given
to Shayya's assassination in the Western media, but his life and death have become
the center of a heated debate between Arab intellectuals, involving difficult
questions on war, occupation, collaboration,resistance; questions that are likely
to be central for Iraqis and Arabs for years to come, regardless of the eventual
fate of the US enterprise in the country.

The first flare in Shayya's controversy began when Pierre Abi Sa'b, the cultural
editor of al-Akhbar newspaper, penned an obituary for his fallen friend,
describing him as "our martyr, all of us. The martyr of contemporary Arab utopia
(in reference to Shayya's academic interests.)"
Abi Sa'b did not hide the fact that he disagreed with Shayya' when he decided,
in 2003, to return to Iraq and be part of the new US-sponsored government."

However, Mithal Al-Alusi has avoided assasination.

Liberal Iraqi MP Mithal Alusi’s family home in West Baghdad's Hai
Al-Jam’ia neighborhood was reduced to rubble this morning after
terrorists had rigged the structure with explosives in an apparent
assassination attempt. Alusi, a Sunni, had been leading in recent weeks
the drive to repatriate internally displaced Shia and Sunni families
back to their neighborhoods in Western Baghdad.

A couple of days ago, Alusi visited the house that his late father, a college
professor, had built in the 1970s but did not enter the premises. There is a ‘Sons
of Iraq’ checkpoint manned by ex-insurgents directly across from the
house. An investigation as to the causes of their negligence (surprise,
surprise) is underway by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

Today’s event is a reminder that men such as Alusi, whose two sons were killed
in a previous assassination attempt in February 2005, are still active
in Iraqi politics and had never given up on the country despite being
embattled and unfunded. He always stood for a secular and non-sectarian
patriotic agenda, one that is being emulated by many Iraqi politicians
now. It is even being parroted by the Consensus Bloc that rejoined
Maliki's cabinet a couple of days ago. They have come a long way since
their previous candidate for the Ministry of Culture fled Iraq over a
year ago--with U.S. official connivance--ahead of an arrest warrant
charging him with the murder of Alusi's sons.

He has even appeared at an anti-terror conference in Herzilya, Israel last week!

Iraqi parliament member Mithal al-Alousi delivered the opening statements
at the Herzliyah Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) Conference Wednesday,
in which he called for stronger relations between Iraq and Israel.

Al-Alousi also called for stronger cooperation between Iraq and
Israel in fighting terror, and issued a harsh condemnation of Iran,
which he accused of meddling in Iraqi affairs.

The Iraqi parliamentarian has spoken at the ICT conference two
previous times. His visit in 2004 elicited harsh criticism in Iraq and
several attacks were launched against them, including one that left his
two sons dead.

----------------------------------

Recently, there has been a great deal of research published on the Iraq situation,
especially after the Sinjar raid in which Al-Queda in Mesopotamia documents were
captured by Iraqi and American troops. The following are some of the studies put
out recently that shed light on how the conflict is developing. All three of these
documents (with the possible exception of the Brookings report below) are heavily
indebted to the American war effort and thus will reflect quite obvious bias. Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout is for instance written by West Point military men!

Nevertheless, for sheer statistics as well as for their insight into American imperial policy and the
internal Iraqi situation, I believe they are worth the read. Now the critical question with regards to Iraq is not whether the Americans will withdraw (they will), but what are the forces of the ground that may push for a more progressive society in the wake of withdraw? What are the forces that will push for civil war? And has the last five years of mayhem diminished the stature of the fundamentalists and sectarians?

The Iraq Index by the Saban Center for Mid-East Policy

A compilation of statistics and facts on Iraq researched and published by the Brookings group, updated in late August.

Includes:

Estimated Number of Iraqi Civilian Fatalities by Month, May 2003-Present…………………………………………………………………………………4
Detailed Explanation of Iraqi Civilian Fatality Estimates by Time Period…………………………………………………………………………………….5
Multiple Fatality Bombings in Iraq………………………………………………..………..…………………………………..……………..……..…….9
Killed and Wounded in Multiple Fatality Bombings………………………………………………………………………………..…………………………...9
Multiple Fatality Bombings by Type Since January 2007…………………………………………………….………………………………………………..10
Detailed Breakdown of Deaths Associated with Multiple Fatality Bombings in Iraq……………………….…………………………………………..…...10
Number of Multiple Fatality Bombings Targeting Civilians by Sectarian Group and Month………………………………………………………………11
Number of Newly Displaced People Per Month in Iraq, Externally and Abroad…………………………………………..………………………………...11
Number and Current Status of Concerned Local Citizens (CLC’s) in Iraq…………………………………………………………………………………..12
Status of the Sons of Iraq by Location (With Monthly Pay)………………………………………NEW……………………………………………………..12
Weapons Caches Found and Cleared in Iraq, by Year………………………………………………………………………………………………………...12
Progress of Political Benchmarks Agreed upon by the bush Administration and the Iraqi Government………………………………………………….13
Journalists Killed in Iraq…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..………………..……………21
Nationalities of Journalists Killed in Iraq….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……..21
Circumstances of Journalist Deaths……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..21
Iraqis Kidnapped……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………......…………..….…21
Iraqi Civilians Killed by US Troops……………………………………………………………………………………………………….………...…………..21
Fuel………….……………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….39
Oil Revenue from Exports……………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..…………….……………..40
Electricity………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…………………….……….….…………….41
Nationwide Unemployment Rate………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………………..……42

Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout

...not only expands on the analysis of the Sinjar Records conducted in the first report, it also introduces a host of new data, including:

* Statistics on the exact number and nationality of foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Bucca in Iraq.

* Contracts signed by AQI's foreign suicide bombers

* Contracts signed by AQI fighters entering and leaving Iraq

* Accounting sheets signed by various fighters that indicate funding sources and expenditures

* Several narratives describing AQI’s network in Syria, personnel problems, and ties to Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon

* Weapons reports, etc.

Findings

The report has several major new findings:

* Foreign Fighters were an important source of funds for AQI; Saudi Fighters contributed far more money than any other nationality

* Far more Syrians and Egyptians are held at Camp Bucca than were listed in the Sinjar Records, which likely reflects the demographic shift away from those nationalities

* Approximately 75% of suicide bombings in Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007 can be attributed to fighters listed in the Sinjar Records.

* “Bleedout” of fighters from Iraq is occurring, but in relatively small numbers. Nonetheless, these individual fighters will likely be well-trained and very dangerous. The primary threat from these fighters is to Arab states, Af-Pak, and perhaps Somalia.

* Smuggling of all kinds across the Syrian/Iraqi border has long been linked to corruption in both Syria and Iraq, which limits both government’s ability to crackdown.

* Fighters that contributed money to AQI were more likely to become suicide bombers.

Special Groups Regenerate in Iraq by the Weekly Standard

Most Dangerous Course of Action

The Special Groups and Iranian-retrained
JAM can take a less immediately violent,
but more strategically dangerous course
of action: namely, to reintroduce a bettertrained
and well-commanded militia in 2009 or
later, as U.S. forces draw down. The training and
reorganizational period might compensate not
only for tactical weaknesses, but for the brittleness
of the command structure that accounted for
its inadequacy. Ties between commanders of
different geographical areas and echelons could
be strengthened in Iran, if the organizations are
not excessively fractious or if leadership there
has the capability to overcome disagreements
quickly. Alternatively, it is possible that the
IRGC-QF could create an elite and responsive
force – weeding out divisive members and leaders
and retraining them over a six-month to a year
period– in order to have a small but effective
militia capable of fomenting attacks against the
government of Iraq over the long-term. The most
likely form of this militia would be an adaptation
of the Hezbollah model suitably modified for
Iraq, which could be reintroduced whenever or
wherever the government is suitably weak. The
organization might be ready to function during
the 2009 national election or in 2010 as the new
Parliament, Prime Minister, and Cabinet take
office—a moment that was central to the creation
and use of Special Groups in 2006.

Scattered Observations

2008-08-29T14:58:00.009+09:00

Kazuya Itou was a volunteer working with the Peshwar no Kai group in Afghanistan. The Peshwar-kai is an NGO that has deeply embedded itself in the Afghan countryside and has delivered medical treatment, dug wells, built irrigation channels, and contributed to reviving the ecosystem of the countryside among other concrete human development. Kazuya Itou volunteered, and risked his life to join the mission of reviving Afghan society after nearly 30 years of civil war. His means were peaceful, and he describes his intentions in this way:

"Judging my current abilities, honestly I'm terrible at languages. I also can't deny that I have no experience or knowledge in agriculture. However I want to learn together with the people of Afghanistan.
My aim is to help restore Afghanistan to the rich and green country that it should be. This is not something that can happen in two or three years."

For these quite noble goals instead, Mr. Itou was shot and killed by a Taliban group. This was not a random attack, his attackers have made their motivations clear: ransoming Mr. Itou for money and creating chaos for the Afghan government. And so his life, and his mission have been ended.

Did this order come from on high? It seems unlikely since Afghanistan's Taliban have over the past six years split into several different organizations, more likely this was a crime of opportunity. And yet this did not stop a Taliban organization from issuing a statement declaring that "the killings will not stop until all foreigners leave Afghanistan," and that "although this organization makes itself useful to Afghans, they are spies who bring in western influence." Thus, even the Peshwar kai, an organization dedicated exclusively to the peaceful reconstruction of Afghan society (and adamantly against the American and NATO occupation) is targeted not only at the ground level, also at the political level by Taliban fundamentalism. These brutes have announced that "We will kill members of any aid organization, even if their country has not sent troops to Afghanistan."

The killers.

There is more to this story. I have personally seen the main representative of Peshwar-kai, Tetsu Nakamura, speak at Kyoto University in 2006, and I remember being very disenchanted with his speech. Of course he layed out the various activities that the group was undertaking in the country which are all very laudable and worthy of emulation. He also described how he saw these activities as directly linked to article 9 of the Japanese constitution. However, when the discussion turned to politics, he repeatedly denounced the presence of the American and NATO-led occupation of Afghanistan. When an audience member asked him what we can do about the situation in Afghanistan, he said "I think we can only wait until America collapses as a country." This struck me as a profoundly reactionary declaration. And yet everyone around me, NGO workers and audience members alike gave him a standing ovation after this, his final statement.

I do not mean to question the important work that the Peshwar-kai undertakes in Afghanistan, their bravery, nor the events that they have seen which lead them to their conclusions. However it is obvious enough that the organization and its adherents subscribed to a reactionary ideology and eventually fell victim to it. How?

Take for instance this interview that Magazine 9 did with Tetsu Nakamura, the Peshwar-kai's representative, on April 30th where his views on progressive social change become clear.

"In Afghanistan, the amount of people who are dying is growing. Of 25 million people in the country, 12 million will be affected by drought, 5 million are at the starvation line and 10 million are right below the starvation line. And then you've got these people trying to realize male/female equality, or put in communication networks around the country, really now what's that about?"

....

"Q: So the Peshwar-kai has managed to embed itself quite deeply in Afghanistan it seems.

Nakamura: Yes. Afghans are very pro-Japanese. Plus we have always respected religion.

Q: Religion? I guess you mean Islam...

A: Largely there has been a lot of activity that has no understanding of Islam. For example, female equality programs which want to assert womens rights and whatnot. Look, if you try to do that out there, the women will reject it first of all. They'll think like: what is this, some Christian prosletyzing?"

So Nakamura at least takes an antagonistic view towards gender equality.

Even worse, in this article, written right at the start of the Afghanistan war, he emphatically defends the Taliban regime and the right of councils of elders to accept Taliban leadership in villages. He talks about how in 2001, although women are not allowed to go to school, the Taliban government will look the other way when they go to 'secret schools'. He would spend the next seven years denouncing the occupation and the aid efforts of most NGOs. And now these same Taliban, wrested from power, are burning down women's schools across the country, in fact just last week in Peshwar, of all places.

I could do a lot more to expose the contradictions of the Peshwar-kai's ideology. Friends have told me that the organization at one time boasted of 'being Taliban', not in the armed sense, but in 'belonging' to the countryside. To 'be Taliban' how many times must someone look the other way when women are stoned to death, and informal Islamic courts sentence people to execution? Still, one thing is undeniable. When Mr. Itou was murdered, more than a thousand villagers took to the countryside to find the killers and arrest them. Just from that mobilization we can tell that the Peshwar-kai's activities are widely respected and deserve greater attention. And yet in the end, their efforts are mostly for naught, since they are being evacuated from the country along with most NGOs given the collapsing security situation.

Mr. Nakamura and those who sympathize with him say a lot about the hopeless ideologies that people will turn to when real social progress seems unattainable. The Peshwar-kai holds something like 10 conferences and discussions a month across Japan, it is fair to say that the organization is one of the most influential Japanese aid organizations in the country, and are depended on for an understanding of the Afghan conflict.

I can't help but remember the murder of Margaret Hassan, the anti-war volunteer working in Baghdad since before the war, who was killed and left in a bag on the roadside, her arms and legs severed and her throat slit. That was definitely the point, after so many Iraqi leftists, reporters, and other aid workers had been killed, where I realized that I could no longer see eye-to-eye with the anti-war left, who would accept anything over the flawed bourgeois democracy that the coalition was trying to achieve. Given the brutal murder of Kazuya Itou, perhaps there will be others in Japan who realize that compromising with religious fascists is the first step in getting killed by them.

****************************

Which leads to....

Seen at the protest agains the DNC rally (warning: vile right-wing link) organized by the broad anti-war left. Someone should perhaps inform these idiots that it is the Sadrists that are probably most responsible for the near-extinction of progressives and socialists from Iraq. Their Islamic courts were arresting and executing communists once the insurgency got underway in 2004. And their organization has stayed consistent to its original mission: reactionary opposition to occupation in the service of sectarian Shi'ism.

In other words, they would literally kill you. And others like you who live in their country.

Those who dig their own graves cannot complain when the dirt starts filling in.

****************************

And in Gaza, again teachers are on strike, this time expressly against the Hamas regime. Which the gutless writers at Electronic Intifada can only describe as "Palestinian political tensions impacting (the) education sector". Why not call it what it is? A working class struggle against fundamentalism and dictatorship.

The General Secretariat of General Union of Palestinian Teachers, which is aligned with the Fatah movement, declared a five-day strike at public schools throughout the Gaza Strip to be launched on 24 August, the first day of the new school year, in protest to what it described as "arbitrary decisions" taken by the Ministry of Education of the Gaza government. These decisions have included transferring school directors and teachers to other schools, arresting a number of directors and teachers, attacking janitors and confiscating keys to schools.

According to information gathered by PCHR field workers, on the first day of the new school year, Sunday 24 August 2008, a partial strike was reported at all public educational institutions in the Gaza Strip. The commitment of teachers to the strike was estimated at 45 to 55 percent. Consequently, the first day of school was largely disrupted as many school directors, teachers and administrative staff committed themselves to the five-day strike declared by the General Union of Palestinian Teachers. In a subsequent development, the Internal Security Service belonging to the Ministry of Interior of the Gaza government circulated communiqués to directors of public schools, in which it threatened to take what it called "necessary legal actions" against whoever disrupts the educational process.

And from another article:

Hamas...installed hundreds of new teachers almost immediately after the walkout began. Education Minister Mohammed Askoul estimated 2,000 of the 9,000 public school teachers had been replaced
"Anybody who left their job will not be allowed to return," Askoul said. "They have become irrelevant and cannot be trusted anymore as educators."

Don't forget the last time there was a public workers strike in Gaza.

So what scions of the internationalist left can we expect to stand in solidarity with the strike-breaking government of Gaza after the firing of over 2000 teachers? Is there any need to revisit the myriad ways in which the repression of working class antagonism works not only to aggravate the fundamentalist hot house but teaches the rest of the dispossesed not to speak up? Ask yourself how long it will be until Hamas finds that it must divert energies that chafe against its internal dictatorship by launching another rocket war against Israeli civilians.

2008-05-10T01:14:00.003+09:00

Beirut

Follow along:
http://sursock.blogspot.com/
http://marxistfromlebanon.blogspot.com/

Beer and communism is the way of the phuture

2007-12-13T12:45:00.000+09:00

Readers of the asayake blog, thanks for your support over the years. My comrade Jesse Blue and I have decided to start a group blog at Beer and Communism with the somewhat obnoxious theme of inebriants and communist critique (plus a heavy critique of anti-imperialism). Expect discussions of class struggle, Israel, Palestine, Europe, the Middle East, Japan and more. Please have a look, bookmark the page, add it to your links, send it to your friends etc. etc. And be in touch! Hasta la victoria siempre...

Against the Anti-Globalization Critiques

2007-11-06T00:28:00.000+09:00

Why Your Revolution Is No Liberation - a reader (thanks to Engage!!)

Added by Mira Vogel on November 05, 2007 01:30:46 PM.

The dominant anti-globalisation grievance against capitalism goes something like this. Money- and market-orientated processes have reduced human beings to commodities, robbing them of any means of existence except the sale of their own labour-power in exchange for tokens of commodity-value: money. Value therefore comes to be overwhelmingly predetermined by the concrete terms of money. Money comes to dictate social relations with human and environmental degradation as an inevitable consequence. Money is therefore the essence of capitalism and capitalism's overthrow will hinge on the rejection of money and money-grubbing and the adoption of more natural, authentic, humanising forms of capital - craft and agricultural. Here the discourse becomes personalised.

Why Your Revolution is No Liberation is a reader critiquing this analysis of capitalism. From the introduction:

"A criticism of capitalism limited to big players bypasses the totality of societal relations and disguises these by presenting a concrete scapegoat that can also serve as the object of violence for the anti-capitalist revolution."

"... the personalisation of the capitalist socialization creates the structure of modern anti-Semitism. Value, money and trade as abstract homeless and exploitative forms are being ascribed to particular persons: Bankers, Fat Cats and capitalists. The step then to the personalisation of anti-Semitism, to the Jew, which most globalisation critics have not taken yet, is only a small one."

Containing writings of Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Jean Amery, Stephan Grigat and Moishe Postone, Why Your Revolution Is No Liberation was compiled in response to a debate between German and Austrian anti-facist groups
and anti-globalisation activists in the run-up to the 33rd G8 summit last June.

It's also available in French and German.

Goldner's latest on capitalist crisis

2007-08-28T16:42:00.000+09:00

Back from the mideast...

For now, read this.

Fictitious Capital For Beginners: Imperialism, 'Anti-Imperialism', and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg

By Loren Goldner

The liquidity crisis currently wiping billions off global stock markets is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Beneath the credit crunch and incipient insolvency crisis lie the economic and political crisis of the USA’s global reign, claims Loren Goldner. But will this mean global depression, wars and intensified authoritarianism, or a renewed opportunity for communism? Goldner returns to the theories of Marx and Luxemburg to examine today's financial and military imperialism, and its left wing ‘anti-imperialist’ mirror

In February of this year the Chinese stock market, which had long been suspected of being in a runaway bubble phase, took a plunge. In the following days that tremor was felt in stock markets around the world. China in recent months has reached the ‘shoe shine boy’ phase of popular stock speculation (a major American investor famously decided to get out of the stock market just before the 1929 crash when a shoeshine boy gave him advice on stocks), and after the (not so welcome) correction, the Chinese market resumed its upward rush to new highs, followed with relief by investors everywhere.

With the slightest historical perspective, we can see that the world shock set off by such a hiccup in a still relatively small market (in terms of what savvy people call ‘total market capitalisation’) is something quite new, unthinkable only a few years ago. China’s stock market can have such an impact because people are aware that any pause, not to say downturn in the country’s economic boom (averaging over 10 percent GDP growth for years on end, whereas Britain in its 19th century heyday was considered quite impressive at 3 or 4 percent) could bring the contemporary worldwide financial euphoria to an end. Increasingly insiders and pundits talk openly of the ‘when, not if’ of a global downturn, or even (for some) cataclysm.

REGIONAL WAR IN THE MID-EAST CALLS FOR CLASS STRUGGLE AND SOLIDARITY WITH ISRAEL

2007-06-16T13:51:00.000+09:00

The Takeover

In a discussion with a German comrade awhile back, I brought up the appeal of Marwan Barghouti, jailed former leader of the Tanzim, and his political faction Al-Mustaqbal. Barghouti had abandoned the Tanzim after a series of suicide bombings, and has a history of collaboration with Israeli left groups such as: Women in Black, Gush Shalom, Yesh Gvul, Ta’ayush etc. My German friend wrote me back saying: "Yes, his politics sound good, but how many guns does he have?"

At the time I was skeptical of his response. The Palestinian intifada had proven (in its best moments) that popular resistance to occupation could overcome a more powerfully armed adversary. What relevance to emancipation would the side with the most weapons really have?

This question was in a way answered rather brutally two days ago in Gaza. By now the basic course of events should be well known: after Hamas' election and refusal to engage with the terms of the Quartet, i.e. ongoing negotiation based on the Oslo accords, tensions developed to explosion between Fatah and Hamas, leading to a state of civil war. What are less clear is what events precipitated this. To understand the current moment we have to return to the period directly after the Hamas election. The boycott of the Hamas government by the west had not gone on for very long when public sector workers in Gaza reacted against the new austerities imposed upon them by Hamas' rejectionism, staging strikes and demonstrations against the government late in 2006. Proving their democratic credentials, Hamas attempted to break the strike, firing on the demonstrators and encouraged students to scab against their teachers.

"As a protest against the attempts by the banks to confiscate part of the emergency money paid out to workers for loan repayments, demonstrators stormed offices of banks in the occupied territories. The industrial action taken by the workers resumed the the same day and rumours of an impending all out strike began to circulate
....
The strike included at its start, 37,000 teachers, 25,000 health workers, and 15,000 other public-services workers
.....
In front of the parliament there were continuous demonstrations with thousands demanding payment of wages, unemployment benefit and the creation of more jobs. They shouted slogans, threw stones at building and stormed the gates until they were brutally repressed by the riot police.

In Ramallah on the 30 August, a crowd of 3,000 people demonstrated outside a venue were Abass was meeting UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan. The demonstrators shouted “From today there is no government anymore. From this day on, there is no parliament anymore!” and “We have no money in our pockets.”
...
Less than a year ago the local Hamas leadership spoke about the possibility of an Intifada against the PNA. Now it is starting to understand that they themselves could be the target of such an event. The government is in negotiations with the strikers and it looks possible that the conflict will come to a negotiated end. The political direction is towards the formation of a unity government.

(Socialist World)

By the time tension between Hamas and Fatah was building towards explosion in the Gaza strip, Hamas had again to cope with the large-scale walkout of 15,000 public sector workers this April. How could Hamas slow this potential Intifada against its government? We could ask Rasem Al Bayari, Palestinian trade unionist of the PGFTU, one of many workers whose life was targeted by Palestinian security forces (led by Hamas). But sheer violence and repression were not adequate to contain the unrest. Hamas found other means more familiar to its activists. By firing or permitting the firing of rockets into southern Israel, Hamas could continue to make the eliminationist case for claims on Israeli territory, creating a focal point of 'national resistance' through which the population could be distracted with the fantasy of evicting the Israeli population. These rockets also double as bait for Israeli counterattacks, which in the event of a large-scale reoccupation of Gaza, Hamas would be in a position to unify the Palestinian factions on its own terms (since this interplay has been one of Hamas' major strategies after disengagement, it is obvious why Olmert has refused to hit Gaza in any major way so far). The focal point of the rocket launches more importantly allowed the party to compete with rival factions in Gaza, where Hamas struggled to increase its influence in streets that it did not fully control.

One of Hamas' major focuses in the Gaza strip since the disengagement has been an effort to recoup the political forces that have held power in the strip after disengagement. The eruption of working class struggle and the challenge of the Fatah faction made these efforts even more important. In Gaza, many of the forces patrolling the ground are clan forces, who may not have an essential loyalty to either Fatah or Hamas. This was made clear in the abduction of Alan Johnston by what are speculated to be Gaza clan forces (whom Hamas cannot crush outright), and his recently announced impending release subsequent to the Gaza coup. In this way Hamas plays a power game with the clans. This NPR segment sheds more light on clan influence in Gaza:

"WESTERVELT: ...in the security vacuum, well-armed clans have stepped in and appear to be consolidating control over key neighborhoods, as well as smuggling operations in Gaza commerce, legal and illegal. Professor Iyad Barghuthi, who runs a Palestinian human rights group, now counts more than 50 unofficial armed groups in Gaza.

Professor IYAD BARGHUTHI (Palestinian Human Rights Activist, Gaza City): You are talking about families. You are talking about, you know, groups with political movements. There's some mafias. And each one of the 53 wants to show that he has the power and he can do whatever he likes.

WESTERVELT: One of the most dominant local factions in Gaza today is the Dogmush clan. Palestinian security officials are extremely reluctant to even talk about the clan, but a senior Israeli security official who spoke on condition of anonymity, warned of growing weapons smuggling in Gaza and said, quote, "the Dogmush clan tells the story of Gaza today. It's clan business and no one in the Palestinian authority has the guts to stand up to them. There is no accountability," end quote.

A few of the many examples of Gaza chaos: masked gunmen recently shot up the convoy of the Gaza director of the U.N. agency that provides emergency food aid to nearly one million local people. The attackers remain at large; no one has been arrested. Last week, the new interior minister tried to survey the damage after sewage flooded a North Gaza village, killing five people. When the minister arrived, well-armed local families tried to kill him."

Since the channels of real local control in the strip were not fully open to Hamas, and in fact in some respects threatened a counter power, Hamas made its decision to seize political power. Hamas spokesmen like Hamdan Osama came up with a motive, describing clans patrolling in Gaza as 'lawless forces', and 'fiefdoms in Gaza'. Nevermind that Gaza is itself now a lawless fiefdom. The attack that came on the Fatah security forces was therefore at the same time an assertion of dictatorial rule over these clans, and clearly the Gaza working class, since during these melees Hamas forces fired on demonstrators demanding the cessation of hostility between factions. Just yesterday Hamas killed two unarmed peace demonstrators (to no international outcry). 26 people died in the ongoing street struggle in the same day and at least 600 have died in the period since the factional militias began feuding.

"The morgue was overflowing, with four bodies lined up on the floor, and some of the wounded were sleeping on cardboard on the floor.

Two men were killed in revenge slayings Friday, including a Fatah gunman thrown from a roof in what Hamas described as a family grievance - the gunman, they said, had killed a member of a Hamas-allied family. Another Fatah loyalist was shot dead in southern Gaza.

Since Hamas' victory late Thursday, about a dozen Fatah gunmen had been killed in gangland-style executions, Fatah said."

Now that Hamas has effectively split Palestine into two different enclaves it is critical to look at the wider implications and background of forces which made this possible.

Context of the Crisis

The insurgency against the US armed forces in Iraq has completely changed the coherency of American imperialism in the middle East and these changes are visible in the recent events in Gaza. In the midst of the largest crisis of American foreign policy in its history, Washington is increasingly trying to shelve not only the management of the Iraqi state in crisis, but also its stake in the proxy war waged by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria in Iraq onto American allied Arab states in the region. This 'disengagement' could take the form of withdrawal with a political settlement negotiated among regional powers (including Iran) or an escalation into a wider regional Middle East war involving a mobilization of Saudi Arabia against Iran (the Iraqi civil war is an anticipation of this conflict). The results of the latter would be particularly grave for humanity. Washington has gone so far as to look the other way as Turkey invades Kurdistan to attack Kurdish nationalist militias like the PKK, with the Machiavellian logic that perhaps this pressure could produce a compromise on the bitterly contentious city of Kirkuk. Within this, the American ruling class is trying desperately to shore up its position in the Middle East in order to maintain a potential threat in the region.

That has meant in the context of Hamas' putsch in Gaza that the strip could be abandoned to Hamas while the West Bank and even camps in foreign countries like Lebanon are brought under the control of Fatah and the new PA. It is under these conditions that the US would release funding for the newly established PA and Israel will release tax revenues withheld from the Hamas government. The ending of the sanctions will in some ways be an improvement, but only for those in the west bank. In this way, America tries to prop up a new Palestinian Authority, loosely federated with the remaining American-allied ruling classes in the region: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Lebanon and Iraq (both shaky).

The reinforcement of Fatah is primarily an effort by the Western ruling class to reinforce its credible threat against the emerging opposition belt from Lebanon to Iran to Syria. There have already been many arguments in the media for bringing both Fatah and Hamas into the 'Sunni orbit', which refers to the American-allied states in the region. Hamas on the other hand is largely viewed as a lost cause due to its engagement with Iran and Syria.

By now much of the left is able to identify the ruthlessness of Hamas in the Gaza takeover. Some on the far left even take a clear position against both Hamas and Fatah, whom they argue will to varying degrees repress struggles within Palestinian society. In a discussion recently a comrade summarized this position succinctly:

"...it's a conflict between two completely reactionary forces and ideologies."

I would agree with this statement in many ways. However, it does not acknowledge that in Fatah and Hamas we are dealing with two ideologies (and therefore forces on the ground) which have very different goals and implications. The goals of the US, the quartet and the PA etc. are quite clear: territorial compromises in the West Bank to Israel and an ominous segmenting of Palestinian territory in exchange for a Palestinian state that can effectively control its population. There are larger themes at work here but I would argue that their motivations are based in the classical interest of state control over territory. In contrast it has long been clear that Hamas is part of a wider spectrum that includes forces calling for the complete elimination of Israel. Not only Ahmedinajad, but Syria, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood etc., in Europe elements of the right and some on the left who while making disclaimers are only too quick to apologize for the efforts of Hamas and Hezbollah. All of these parties are strictly speaking 'rational actors' on bourgeois terrain: they want to extend their influence just like America and NATO does, the difference is that they use eliminatory rhetoric, which dehumanizes Israelis. This sort of irrational discourse against Israelis has become quite common. By now it is cresting in industrial action by British unions against all Israeli academics (instead of a specific critique and hostile engagement with those who have supported the occupation), which isn't a lot different from the logic that drives the eliminatory factions. Britain's UNISON union and the largest trade union in South Africa, the Casatu, have jumped on this train and are seeking to spearhead their own boycotts. Rapidly the left (but more importantly, popular opinion) is losing analytical specificity for the texture of the entire conflict. I have argued in my piece 'When the Grass is cut, the Snakes will Show' that this is a direct result of the collapse of American imperialism in the mid-East and that while it has potentially good implications in terms of a slow end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that the easy discourse which managed to blame the brutality of capitalism on Arabs themselves (and justify suspicion towards them domestically) will now be turned against Israel and in turn, Jews, in the absence of a popularized communist critique capable of exposing the capitalist crisis beneath.

Anti-Israel pathos of course shares many characteristics of anti-semitism, but not all of them. One similarity is the universal appeal of both trains of thought, that people anywhere who may have even no contact with Jews, are able to convince themselves that there is an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy working out of Geneva or Jerusalem directing American domination of the middle East. More and more thought like this substitutes for class struggle and in the worst ways, becomes an ideological inversion bent on its own defeat.

The question is what steps can be taken not only to attack the economic relations which we animate (class struggle), the same relations which empower the imperialist regional war in the middle East, but also how a political break with the existing war discourse can be produced. The former must be the priority since there are no forces waiting in the wings so to speak which could tip the scales in our favor, i.e. forces which could embody or popularize a better society. In the middle east for instance, one by one, the competing militias inherit the torture chambers of the regimes they supposedly opposed.

As far as a political break with the war discourse, I do not think that the communist indictment of both sides of the regional war has made many inroads. If anything alienation from the entire subject has grown epidemic and the influence of liberatory ideas in these frameworks has not expanded by much (1). Increasingly, people turn to any savior that appears to have even an ounce of integrity (see the popularity of presidential candidate Ron Paul for one example). But in particular, it is action and discussion around Israel that has entered a spiral of misinterpretation.

Where obvious idiots like the anti-semites of the libertarian right (anti-war.com etc.), and 'left' anti-imperialists like George Galloway, Sue Blackwell and so on pave the way for a hollowed out discussion of Israeli history, more concretely, Islamic Jihad and others give life to an ideological identification of all Israelis with the occupation government, by dumping missiles into Southern Israel, demonstrating the appeal of killing, or terrorizing any Israeli for 'their' crimes. Although Hamas is a different organization, it shares these tactics, differing only in that as a ruling state party it is obligated to channel (and outright oppress) class struggle in the classical sense.

Given this, and the struggle to produce eliminationist spectacles on Gaza's northern border, the nationalist factions more and more find their audience in the attack upon Israel as a body (partially because suicide bombing is now less of an option). That is, where a real class struggle would necessarily come into conflict with the occupation forces, even this is discarded towards a more general nihilistic assault on Israel as a place, Israel as an idea. I think this is at least a major difference between the first intifada and the second and this change has of course been consciously driven by elements in Palestine, Damascus, Tehran, Hezbollah etc. In the same way we see the growing influence of these actions reflected in worldwide popular opinion.

The attacks against Israel on the plane of history and ideology present a particular danger in my view. Popular opinion is generally drifting towards the idea that Israel is a nation that deserves either abandonment, dissolution or, in the extreme, elimination. I'm prepared to argue the exact opposite: that Israel is the only nation with a good reason to exist. That is, along with some on the German left, I think that an opposition to capitalism, imperialism and nationalism must include a solidarity with Israel, a nation whose creation was an inevitable result of the failure of the first revolutionary wave which could not prevent or defeat Europe's lapse into anti-semetic barbarism. The subsequent history of Zionism and Israel is as much a history of liberation as it is a history of imperialism and colonialism.

Since Israel is itself a participant in the imperialist conflict in the mid-east now, this solidarity does not include support for its military adventures. I would argue along with some on the Israeli left that there could be an Israeli nation that both defends itself against elimination and refuses the wars that the west requests of it (for instance, Olmert was requested by France to 'regime change' Syria during the second Lebanon war). Making an exception for Israel does not excuse in every way the manner in which the nation came about, its imperialism nor its treatment of its neighbors, I'm arguing only for the necessity of a Jewish nation after Auschwitz, not its use as a warhead against its Arab neighbors.

Israel has enough of its own contradictions in regards to its own population to make obvious that in many ways it fails its own mandate (the oppression of the Mizrahi Jews, or the past employment by the state of Nazi war criminals are some examples that speak to the depth of Israeli contradictions). Like any nation, for whatever ideal it is created for, it will act as an incubator for the state and capitalism, and thus deserves to be overcome by a wider human community. Israel itself is far from an embodiment of liberatory or even classic bourgeois ideals, and in many ways reflects their failures. Nevertheless, these smaller contradictions do not amount to an argument for prioritizing its abolition above others. Nor do they justify unrealistic expectations on Israelis to dissolve themselves into a single society with their neighbors (the position of many of those who voted to boycott Israel in the UCU) which is not a demand placed on any other people in the world. The chief motor of the imperialist malaise lies in the developed countries (specifically the west) and that's where our opposition should be; within that opposition I think we have to stand against the slide into negationist history by expressing a critical solidarity with Israel.

(1) One good example (and there are many others) of a struggle across borders has been provided by the Fire Brigades Union of Britain, who lugged two fire engines through Europe and Turkey into Iraq to fight the fires of war.

Scream Quietly or the Neighbors will Hear

2007-06-16T08:58:00.001+09:00

From Layla Anwar...

I remember reading a book some years back. I cannot remember the name of the author though. I did warn you that I am bad with names. But the exact title is well lodged in my mind: "Scream quietly or the neighbors will hear".

The book was about female battering. You know what woman battering is don't you?

It is basically when a man beats, strikes, punches, kicks, pounds...a woman and sometimes severly enough that she ends up in hospital and sometimes severly enough to bring about her death.

It is interesting to note that the verb "to batter" is also used in cooking i.e to make a dough. The French have similar anologies between battering a woman and food. They would say he turned her into a "compote".(compote is cooked fruits). Ditto for Arabic expressions. They would say he broke her bones, they became like "soup"...
Am sure other "cultures" have more analogies of the same sort. I will leave it to you to dig up some expressions that you are familiar with, along the same lines...

Did you notice something here? A common trait in the use of words, in the use of language?

It is as if they allude to render that "thing" liquefied, easily moulded, soft to the palate...
In sum, easily mixed and easily digestible. I will also leave it to you to make further associations on the same theme.

No society is immune from woman battering. I will not dwell on figures now. All societies are guilty of it. East and West, equally guilty. And R.Kipling was wrong when he said that East and West shall never meet. They do meet. They met. They met in Iraq.

They met in Iraq, the land, the earth, the Mother...
They also met and agreed on her daughters bodies - Iraqi Women.

That body which, since the "liberation", has become a public commodity. A public thing. A thing to be veiled, a thing to be controlled, a thing to be ordered about, a thing to be disposed of, a thing to be battered, moulded, shaped into a liquefied, soft, yielding thing. A digestible thing.

Yes, batter, pound, strike, punch, beat, rape, torture, imprison...that "thing" and ultimately dispose of it, annihilate it.

Both "East and West" are bent on the destruction of Iraqi women.
It is as if, plundered, occupied Iraq has become the center point, the "lieu" where these forces can pour out their venom, their deep hatred, their frustrated instincts, their perversities...In sum their collective misogyny.

And those who know me a little by now, know what I mean by East & West. Just in case you are new to this blog. East is metaphorically used for Iran and West for none other but the "greatest democracy on earth", America.

Continued...

交流と運動

2007-06-14T19:50:00.001+09:00

先日、仲間たちと一緒にパレスチナ関係２つの映画を上映してていただいた。そこでパレスチナとレバノンの歴史について以下の反省を書いた。

皆様
先日上映していただいた２つの映画に深い印象を持ちました。名称がわからない１つ目はパレスチナ領域内で住民たちの蜂起の犠牲と怒りに感動しました。アラビア語が苦手なため言葉が通じなかったけど、政治派なし行動して弾圧に対して闘っているパレスチナ人の姿、そして政治派の旗なしの長い葬列の姿は現在のパレスチナでは見当たらなくなってきてものすごい感動的でした。

２つ目の映画の方は、観たときにイスラエルの空爆の残虐性と犠牲人の耐え難い被災をよくあらわすこと一方、レバノン戦争・内戦の事実の一部しか表さないし、情報を省略することで不正直だと反応しました。前に内戦時代に触れる２つの本を読んだことあったのに、その場で歴史の流れを早めに思い出して語ることができなくてちょっと気落ちました。なので、翌日の出勤で内職研究ということでWikipediaなどのサイトを読みながら、内戦・侵攻の流れを調べなおしました。

（Wikiレバノン内戦の歴史、日本語）

（Wikiレバノン内戦の歴史、英語）

内戦についてWiki日本のエントリーが情報不足で、以下の引っ張ったところが英語のWikiページからなります。英語が苦手な方、申し訳ありません。なるべく解説しようとします。では、見てみましょう。

まず、内戦の総括を言うと

「Lebanon still bears deep scars from the civil war. In all, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed, and another 100,000 handicapped by injuries. Approximately 900,000 people, representing one-fifth of the pre-war population, were displaced from their homes. Perhaps a quarter of a million emigrated permanently. Thousands of land mines remain buried in the previously contested areas. Some Western hostages kidnapped during the mid-1980s (many claim by Hezbollah, though the movement denies this) were held until May 1992[31]. Lebanese victims of kidnapping and wartime "disappeared" number in the tens of thousands[citation needed].」

要するに内戦時代で１０万人ほど死亡したとのこと。死んだ人の中、映画で語られるベイルート包囲の間イスラエルの攻撃で何人が死亡したでしょう？

「The number of civilian casualties is disputed, and is probably between 10,000 and 12,000. The math is as follows: An Nahar, a Lebanese paper published in Beirut, estimated that the total military personnel and civilians dead from the Lebanon campaign (up to and including the siege) was 17,825. Subtract 2,000 Syrian dead, 1,400 PLO and 1,000-3,000 civilians killed in the southern campaign, 1,000 PLO killed in the siege, and the 368 IDF killed. This number excludes the 750-3,000 Palestinian refugees killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which occurred when Israel broke into West Beirut after the assassination of Gemayel, in defiance of the peace accord negotiated by Habib, and allowed Phalangist forces into the camps.」

つまりベイルート包囲で民間人の死亡数は１万人から１万２千人ぐらいだといいます。イスラエルの南より侵攻で３０００人と、サブラ・シャティラ避難民キャンプで虐殺された最大３０００人を加えたら、13万死亡人弱ですね。もしイスラエルの1978侵攻で死亡した民間人を加えるとしたら、南レバノン侵攻のWiki歴史によると

「The Israeli Army occupied most of the area south of the Litani River, resulting in the evacuation of at least 100,000 Lebanese [5], as well as approximately 2,000 deaths.」

約２０００人が死亡したので、イスラエルのレバノン対軍隊介入のせいで最大15万レバノン人とパレスチナ人が殺されてしまったらしい。映画がよく表現したように攻撃の方法だけでなく、使った武器は特有の残虐性を持って、政治的・軍隊的な対象だけでなく、民間人も対象になったとは明らかです。

イスラエルの介入は内戦の一部に過ぎないので、内戦で死亡した民間人の１０万人の残りはだれに殺された、なんで殺されたを知るには詳しく歴史を見ないとはっきり把握できないだろうと思います。ただし、イスラエルの1982年の侵攻という時点にいたるまで、事前に大量虐殺がいくつかあったし、知っているはずな映画の監督さんが内戦の経緯と虐殺の歴史に全く触れないのは疑問に思います。いくつか当時の虐殺を研究してきました。

黒い土曜日

「In an orgy of bloodletting, several hundred people were murdered in a few hours, most of them civilian. Estimations of the total number of victims range between 200 and 600.」

黒い土曜日といい、ファランジスト派（キリスト教右派）に起こした、６００人に至った両側が巻き込んだ虐殺でした。レバノン内戦の始まりといってもいいです。

テル・アル・ザータール虐殺

テル・アル・ザータール虐殺で、シリア軍がテル・アル・ザータールという難民キャンプを包囲して、マロン右派と協力して、３０００人の民間人を大量虐殺してしまいました。

「On August 12 the camp finally fell, following an on-and-off siege of several months. During the last two months, the siege had tightened with Syrian backing. Heavy artillery shelling damaged much of the camp and killed a number of inhabitants. As the militias took control of the camp, its inhabitants were forcibly evacuated - or ethnically cleansed - towards Muslim-held Western Beirut. During the evacuation, militia forces are said to have machine-gunned refugee columns, and others were killed with gunfire, grenades and knives inside the camp; a large number of rapes were also reported. The camp itself was completely obliterated to prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Harris (p. 165) writes that "Perhaps 3,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died in the siege and its aftermath"
Cobban (p. 142) writes that 1 500 camp residents were killed in one day and a total of 2 200 were killed throughout the events.」

南レバノン紛争

当時にイスラエル領内で、以下の３つの虐殺もありました。

「# On 15 May 1974 members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine infiltrated the Israeli border town of Ma'alot from Lebanon, killing five adults and taking grade 11 children in a local school hostage. They eventually shot 21 of the children, before being killed by IDF soldiers, in the Ma'alot massacre.

# On the night of 4 March 1975 eight PLO gunmen travelled from Lebanon to Tel Aviv by sea in a rubber dinghy, entered the Savoy Hotel and took dozens of hostages. During the rescue mission three IDF soldiers were killed and eight hostages wounded; the PLO gunmen retreated to a room and attempted to blow themselves up, killing eight hostages and wounding 11, as well as killing seven of the PLO gunmen. See Savoy Operation.

# On 11 March 1978, 11 Fatah members led by the 18-year old female Dalal Mughrabi travelled from Lebanon and killed an American tourist on the beach. They then hijacked a bus on the coastal road near Haifa, and en route to Tel Aviv commandeered a second bus. After a lengthy chase and shootout, 37 Israelis were killed and 76 wounded [1]. This, the Coastal Road Massacre, was the proximate cause of the Israeli invasion three days later. (Cobban, p.94, Shlaim p.369)」

これらの虐殺は１９７８イスラエル侵攻の原因のいくつかになりました。

カランティーナ虐殺

カランティーナ虐殺では、１０００人以上のパレスチナ人、シア派アラブ人などが虐殺されました。

「Harris (p. 162) notes "the massacre of 1,500 Palestinians, Shi'is, and others in Karantina and Maslakh, and the revenge killings of hundreds of Christians in Damur".」

ダームア虐殺

カランティーナ虐殺の復讐としてダームア虐殺というのも実施されてしまいました。

「Twenty Phalangist militiamen were executed and then civilians were lined up against a wall and sprayed with machine-gun fire. An unknown number of women were raped, babies shot at close range, and bodies were mutilated and dismembered. None of the remaining inhabitants survived.[2] Estimates of the civilian dead range from 25–30[3] to 582[4] with the most reliable figure probably being around 330.」

変に、虐殺を実行した人の中に日本人までいたということが書いてあります。

「The bulk of the attacking forces seems to have been composed by brigades from the Palestinian Liberation Army[9] and as-Sa'iqa, as well as other militias including Fatah. Some sources also mention the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Muslim Lebanese al-Murabitun militia among the attackers. There are also reports that mercenaries or militiamen from Syria, Jordan, Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan were part of the assault, and even Japanese commandos who were training in Lebanon.」

例の映画はおそらく１９８３・１９８４年に作成されただろうと思うので、Wikipediaにある情報の限り、上記の虐殺が起こったのは当時に明らかであったはずで映画を作製した人たちにも明らかであったはず。本に記録されてあるWikiに書いてない虐殺もあるし、虐殺でもない内戦の日常的な爆弾、そしてシリアの侵攻などでどれだけ人が死亡したことを仮においても、先日私が出張した通りにこんなような映画、すなわち焼かれた人たち、不具の人たちの姿、死体の積み重ねなどを取り上げる映像をレバノン内戦の経緯において、どこでも同じように作成することが出来ただろうと強調します！同じような映画を作ることが出来ただろうといっても、そもそも内戦の状況、文脈を解説せずに戦争のWhy?を分析することがまったくできないし、ある意味で一方的なプロパガンダしか作り出せません。イスラエルの攻撃が特有な残虐性をもち、それなりの目的と文脈があるのは誰でもわかるけど、シリアとその同盟組織の残虐性とその目的は？触られないので、探ることさえできません。内戦のやりとりで、PLO自体に民間人の死亡と虐殺の責任がある（実際、PLOがベイルート包囲時に東ベイルートのキリスト教徒区域を迫撃砲で攻撃し続けた）ということもあるので、映画を作製した人たちは自らの隠し事を負っていると想定してもいい。

キャンプの戦争

映画が作成した年を越えてみたら、イスラエルがレバノンからほとんど撤退してから、内戦が１９８３年から切りなく続いてきました。「キャンプの戦争」という紛争でパレスチナ人とレバノン人がアマル派とマロン派に多く犠牲にされました。歴史的な皮肉として悪名高いサブラ・シャティーラ難民キャンプはまた大量攻撃を受け、今回はシア派のアマル組織に犯されました。

「The camps war 1985–7
Between 1985 and 1987, the Syrian-backed Amal Movement, a major Shia militia, attacked several Palestinian camps in Beirut and in the south in order to get rid of the remaining pro-Arafat PLO combatants (Suleiman 1999: 68). During periods of intense fighting, many of the camps were besieged and cut off from the outside, and suffered from lack of food, clean water, and medical supplies (USCR report 1999: 8). The Amal Movement was not able to control any of the camps; however, it is estimated that the fighting resulted in the destruction of 80 per cent of homes in Shatila camp (Beirut) and 50 per cent of homes in Burj El Barajneh camp (Beirut). Sabra (an informal settlement next to Shatila) was almost totally destroyed. An
estimated 2,500 people were killed during this period (Khalidi 2000: 7).」

つまり３つのキャンプで２５００民間人が虐殺されたとのこと。

「At the end of the war an official Lebanese government reported that the total number of casualties for these battles was put at 3,781 dead and 6,787 wounded in the fighting between Amal and the Palestinians. Furthermore, the number of Palestinians killed in internal struggles between pro-Syrian and independent organizations was around 2,000. The real number is probably higher because thousands of Palestinians were not registered in Lebanon and the blockade meant that no official could access the camps so that all the casualties could not be counted.」

キャンプの戦争が終わったあと、計３７８１人ほど殺されたとのこと。キャンプの戦争後にも、２つの大量虐殺もありました。

１０月１３日の虐殺

「October 13, 1990 at 7:00 a.m The Syrian Forces invaded the Eastern areas which support the Lebanese Army. An estimated 700 people were killed by the Syrian invaders that day and 2000 had been injured. Estimates of the Lebanese Army losses during the battle, of whom some were executed by the Syrians and including Prisoners of War as between 400 to 500 soldiers.」

サッフラの虐殺

「The Phalangist forces launched a surprise attack on the Tigers, a 500-man militia that was the armed force of the National Liberal Party (Lebanon) of ex-Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. The attack claimed the live of roughly 200 people [1]. Dany Chamoun, leader of the Tigers, managed to escape; his daughter Tracy was injuried.」

ここに止めを打ちましょう。レバノンの内戦にはよっぽど長い経緯があり、民間人の犠牲そして虐殺は多くありました。パレスチナ難民の多くが解放的な姿勢を持ち左翼向けで、内戦の複数側から嫌われ、明らかに一番犠牲されたのはパレスチナ人でした。しかし、イスラエル介入の特性を紹介して解説する中、内戦の文脈、虐殺と原因を触らないのは一方的だと思うし、レバノン内戦・侵攻を把握するには部分的にしか役に立てず、その部分に誤解を招く解説もあることで反省すると、先日の映画をかなり批判的に思います！！

Recent correspondence

2007-06-10T18:56:00.000+09:00

Received a nice letter from my friend L (who works with Bustan outside of Jerusalem) in which she enclosed some heirloom seeds native to Israel. I've already got buds in the vegetable boxes, and am particularly looking forward to the dinosaur gourds
and the green jade bush beans!

A few months ago, I had a reply from Phoenix Insurgent, my comrade from Phoenix, replying to my article on worker subjectivity. I think his comments draw out some interesting points. My objective with the piece was to consider some of the directions in which workers grate at the production process in tech industry workplaces. Within that, I wanted to theorize a way to make a break with the traditional confrontation which tends toward a trade union model of struggle, and consider the impact of 'dragging one's feet' or a collective groan which does not make particular demands. He writes:

When I was working for the post office, we were replaced by computers and my entire section was laid off, leaving only a small cadre of old careers doing the work of what used to be a large workforce. We were union, of course, but the union did nothing but lie to us (which wouldn't surprise me now, but then was a source of frustration). Their interest was in defending the careers, who represented the backbone of the union, particularly financially - even though there were permatemps at the site that had been temps for several years.

Anyhow, the point is, there was a lot of cynicism and sarcasm and general shit-talking about the bosses and our obvious fate, but it did nothing. Those of us on the chopping block withdrew some labor, but as the computers came online, our slowdown was undermined by forced early outs (going home early). The careers were protected from this because they had guaranteed minimum hours in the contract that didn't apply to us permatemps. We were hauled into one joint meeting with both careers and permatemps that resulted in no serious challenge to the boss, partly because the shop steward stood right next to the him and lied about the looming layoffs. When the terminations came, we were fired in shifts right before the weekend, so it was very difficult to let anyone know what was happening.

It seemed to me that the divisions in the workplace became impediments because we didn't articulate clear demands that could be defended through solidarity (whether through the union or not). A strong demand that no further automation take place, perhaps backed up by direct action against the computers and a broader work slowdown, would have gone a long way towards defending our jobs, which were already pretty flexible in terms of hours and generally well-compensated with night differentials and such.

I think our inability to act clearly and together towards clear goals was a limitation that allowed management to go forward with their program, eliminating our jobs and, of course, eventually those of the careers as well. Without clear goals, no solidarity could take place with the careers, because they didn't see that our position was just their advanced by a year or two.

Your story keys into the struggle of workers worldwide against redundancies doesn't it? Automation is used as a weapon by managers in order to save on labor costs, meaning that people lose their jobs, and therefore their means to carry on living. PI makes the case that working towards clear goals among employees would have increased communication within the workplace and lead to a broader solidarity. I would say that I agree with this.

One of the contingent factors of the struggle at my own workplace is that we are constantly on computers, we are emailing each other and some people even use instant messaging. This is not live communication, but it does enable a general 'feeling-out' of where we all are at as the day passes, and so we haven't needed to make particular demands. During the more intense periods of confrontation, meetings with management were almost always collective as well, so there was very good communication among workers, only hobbled by a deep sense of trepidation at somewhat important moments. Had our conditions mirrored those of you workplace, I think drawing up demands would have been essential. Thus, some of the points outlined in 'Notes on an Ongoing Workplace Struggle' could not apply to any workplace.

Separate from the question of demands, you raise the question of sabotage and that strikes me as problematic. Let's think about worker opposition to automation. Any wage laborer is prima facie subjected to the conditions of capitalist society, rent, work, wages and so on. Most jobs are worked in order to maintain a person and/or her family. Is the mailroom of a post office not a miserable job? I don't know myself. But it would seem so, and if it is, then by all accounts the workers should be delighted that automation has been introduced to make their roles obsolete. Except that they are not, because their continued subsistence is premised on receiving the wage which the machine obviates. We are stuck at a fork in the road. For the workers to recover themselves they can either oppose the automation, and demand wages on the anti-social terrain of capital, forfeiting a critique of their workplace for a continuous wage. Or they can attempt to attack the workplace socially; we saw this a lot at the end of the 1960s and particularly the 1970s where welfare payments and state spending compensated workers whose jobs were obviated by automation. With this in mind I would claim that the communist effort should be aimed at increasing the level of social struggle around the workplace, such that labor is not trapped on capital's terrain. If anything, the terrain of struggle for precarious and temporary workers is less the workplace than the unemployment office. By building a safety net they critique the organization of society, which automates only to impoverish. If the workers go to war with automation, they will set the stage for new problematic ideologies in my view.

Next, I received a comment on the blog a couple weeks ago from a passing dissident Iranian, who posted a curious rant in Persian. L had her grandmother translate a summary into English for me:

Iran as an official entity is being inflicted by all these hardships and woes because of their father's sins/mistakes that for turning to Islam.

Iran wasn't originally a Muslim country and all the problems they are facing in their government is a result of their mistake of accepting Islam.

Hizbollah has insulted and hurt Iran and everything they (Hizbollah) says is a lie. Those in power in Iran's government are idiots for listening and becoming pawns of Hizbollah. Hizbollah only got ahead and took advantage of Iran because of all the hardships Iran was going through.

Everything going wrong in Iran should really be blamed on Mohommad because he was a disturbed person. (Then there was a long serise of really harsh curses and cussing out of Mohommad and Islam and the Iranian government)

Ristalah is twenty times worse than the devil and the lowest of animals...(not sure what a lot of that paragraph was about).

The Arabs try to say that the kailah e fars (persian gulf) is really the kaligh e arab and belongs to them. There is a big dispute about this. Iranians are upset and outraged about this but meanwhile their actual ruler is Arab (Muslim?) and they don't care about that. People who are from foreign languages are welcomed and invited to spread this all over. (then it ended with some Arabic).

Well.............I do not think all of modern Iran's problems stem from Mohammed's personal issues. Obviously things run much deeper. Among other things, the discussion could not continue without a meditation on Iran's position as an imperialist prize and the role that the Shah's dictatorship played in that.

Iran is now however at the forefront of the ideological war with the west, it is an imperialist power of its own and uses the anti-semitic critique of Israel to unite European and middle Eastern reactionaries into new alliances. Iran is also the chief sponsor of proxy wars against middle Eastern regimes allied to the west and of course Israel, where Iranian money funds the northern and southern fronts. The conflict between the Iranian government and other Arab regimes, Israel, the West etc. is thus rooted in geopolitics and clothed in the evangelical ideology of fundamentalist Islam.

Lastly, Anonymous writes:

sphinx I have read your blog for a long time
thanks for this post: but I am waiting
for you to give us a long coherent argument, why a communist should "support Israel" (and what do we mean here),
instead of just reposting Liberal, right-wing, etc. articles?
(esp. for those of unfamiliar with the "antigerman" current and related views.)

To which I responded:

Hi Anonymous.

I do think communist solidarity with Israel is an essential element of breaking with many of the problematics that anti-imperialism and flawed analysis of capitalist phenomena have brought into anti-capitalist movements. It is a place to insert oneself that provokes, that suddenly unwinds all the previous assumptions and challenges fundamental assertions. That said, it is a problematic position that ultimately deserves its own super cession. However, an overcoming like that is not visible at all on the left, in fact the opposite is true, that discourse around Israel is getting more and more irrational.

I'll write more in detail in a longer post that I'm working on right now about the rockets in Gaza and the boycott movement.

And back:

thanks for your reply. I'll look forward to the longer piece.

to put very crudely the question your very interesting and attractive formation creates for me: how to reconcile the position you sketch with a consistent internationalist position?

and what do we make of this here in the states, where (unlike say on the European left, where I understand leftist pro-Islamism/antisemitism is common and visible) there is widespread anti-Muslim and Arab sentiment, widespread approval of Israeli policies, and a massive fundamentalist Christian movement inculcating its followers with militant apocalyptic Zionism?

the emotional force of your images is directed obviously against the selective attention to murder on the left, but again, versus the US media what can this mean? versus the editorial page of every local paper in America?

Of course these are important considerations. I am working on a longer piece right now that I hope to have done by the end of June that will clarify my own position, the extreme danger that inter-imperialist conflict represents for the population of the Middle East, and the role that the anti-semitic critique plays in this maelstrom. I will attempt to address the question of why communists should have solidarity with Israel, and also: what could this position mean after the massacres in Beirut, Gaza and elsewhere during the second Lebanon war? Such a position is incidentally the very antithesis of the frothing mania of a Jerry Falwell.

In the meantime, anyone interested in the fundamentals of a communist position that calls for solidarity with Israel is invited to read this interview with Stephen Grigat, and visit the anti-deutsch project.

Against the Boycotts

2007-06-01T00:41:00.000+09:00

I have quite a lot to say about the recent boycott attacks against Israelis, but for now this piece will have to do. I send my respect to those in the union who fought this absurd measure and those who fight against this reductionism which leads only to more violence.

Boycotting Israel as moral masturbation
By Bradley Burston

Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're a British academic. You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel's military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded to the point of immorality.

What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently, vigorously and courageously campaigned against the occupation since its inception.

Then attack them.

Single them out for professional ruin. Do your best to get as many of their colleagues around the world to shun them. Yes, just as if you were in seventh grade and had decided to alleviate your own feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, panic and lack of requisite cool by cutting another victim from the middle school herd and lobbying your equally insecure colleagues to abuse the chosen victim.

Choose your victim with care. Select the one group in Israel which has taken substantive physical, professional, legal and personal risks, which has defied the spirit of Israeli nationalism and the letter of Israeli law, in order to seek out Palestinians to search for equitable solutions.

Select the one group which has, from the very beginning, spoken out eloquently for the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination, to freedom from Israeli domination, to freedom from disproportionate and often indiscriminate use of force, to freedom from social injustice.

Then denounce them.

Decide that your moral vision fully empowers you to declare Israeli professors and other university and college faculty to be unworthy of practicing their calling. All of them.

That is, perhaps, the real beauty of the British campaign to declare a quarantine over Israeli academics.

You really must envy the U.K. far-left for its blindness. Its consummate inability to see more than one side, which is to say, its demonstrated refusal to see Jews as fellow human beings, is only exceeded by its exquisite sense of timing.

No matter that in the whole of the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein managed to hit all of Israel with a total of 39 missiles, and that two weeks ago, Hamas sent 40 rockets into the Sderot area in the space of a single day.

No matter that Sapir College, Israel's largest public college, has for years been a primary target of Qassam crews.

No matter that in boycotting all Israeli academics on the basis of their being Israelis, the measure is patently racist, a grotesque reprise of the history of curbing academic freedom.

No matter that Israeli Arab academics who are staunchly opposed to the occupation are vehement opponents of the boycott as well.

No matter, even, that opposition to the boycott runs strong within the British University and College Union itself. In fact, all the more reason to press on.

For the genuine elitist, the unpopularity of an opinion is the best assurance of its real value.

Perhaps this is why the whole boycott campaign smacks of a uniquely far-left British brand of moral masturbation, a desperate, delusional, sterile, supremely self-contained form of non-activism that risks nothing even as it changes nothing.

There must be some reason why no one in this world does condescension better than the British far-left. There must be some reason why the British far-left manages to satisfy itself with a uniquely public, uniquely self-congratulatory form of ideological self-abuse.

Leftists abroad would do well to respect their Israeli counterparts for defying societal norms to work for the rights of people with whom their nation is at war. Perhaps the Israeli left deserves respect, as well, for having to do this while enduring the racist abuse of leftists abroad.

Matthias Kuentzel on some double standards

2007-05-24T23:36:00.000+09:00

As the rockets continue to fall on Sderot from evacuated territory...

Why We Cannot Criticize Israel that Way

A response to Alfred Grosser · By Matthias Küntzel

“I was despised as a Jew by the Germans.” This sentence begins the French political scientist Alfred Grosser’s essay, “Why I Criticize Israel.” He is not the only one to emphasize Jewish identity when criticizing Israel. A German-Jewish group is calling for an end to the Hamas boycott; Jewish-American authors like Tony Judt have argued for the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state; and 350 Jews in Britain (Independent Jewish Voices) have distanced themselves from their umbrella organization’s pro-Israeli position.

Some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawn and the playwright Harold Pinter, seem to have discovered their Jewishness upon becoming critics of Israeli policy, which has garnered them greater attention in the media. The contention that Jews cannot be suspected of anti-Semitism and that they are therefore especially convincing critics, one assumes, is common sense. This, however, contradicts a study published by the American Jewish Committee, which documents anti-Semitism among Jewish writers and concludes that Jews contesting and challenging Israel play a decisive role. This phenomenon represents a “staggering characteristic of new anti-Semitism.”[1] How do we view Alfred Grosser’s criticism of Israel? Are his arguments “especially convincing” or “staggeringly anti-Semitic”?

Grosser calls our attention to “the terrible lot of the inhabitants of Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem” and attributes their circumstances to the “terrible position of present-day Israeli policy.” He writes: “I do not understand the fact that Jews today despise others and claim the right to pursue policy mercilessly in the name of self-defense.” Israel’s violence, he continues, is “luring … so many desperate young people into suicide attacks.” Moreover, the “old, fundamental” Arab question has to be taken seriously: “Why should we bear the onerous consequences of Auschwitz?”

Here, Grosser touches upon a sore spot, crucial to the guilty conscience of many Europeans who hold themselves indirectly responsible for the plight of the Palestinians. This, however, is based on a false assumption: No Arab has had to suffer onerous consequences for Auschwitz. It is true, the experience of the Holocaust in 1947 prompted the United Nations to vote in favor of the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The fact that this resolution at the same time created an Arab Palestinian state, however, has fallen into oblivion.

Eternal Oppressor?

The majority of Arab Palestinians wanted to accept the United Nation’s two state solution in 1947. After all, at this time around 10, 000 Palestinians were working in predominantly Jewish-led industries such as citrus farming. But the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, rejected the two state solution without consulting his fellow Palestinians and persuaded the leaders of the five neighboring Arab nations to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state by all means. The war of 1947-48, just as disastrous as it was avoidable, resulted in the “onerous consequences” Grosser alludes to: 6,000 Israelis and countless Arab Palestinians dead, and innumerable Arab Palestinians and Jews within the rest of the Arab world displaced.

To this day, PLO historiography suppresses Arab voices that supported Zionism or had come to terms with the Zionist movement. It was in this spirit that numerous Arabs welcomed European Jewish immigrants in the 1920s as investors who would help lessen the material and cultural gap between the East and West with new technologies and new enthusiasm. Hillel Cohen’s pioneering study, Palestinian Collaboration With Zionism 1917-1948, enumerates the motives for Arabs to cooperate with Zionists. Some promised themselves personal gain (supplementary income or employment), others co-operated in what they considered to be the best interest of their tribes, villages, or nation, while the motivations of a third group “were ethical and humanist: They had Jews as friends and neighbors and were digusted by the violence of the Palestinian national movement.”[2]

These acts of violence were perpetrated by Arabs whose hatred of Zionists was rooted in the new immigrants’ modern way of live – a way of life that severely challenged traditional customs. While, as a rule, the branch of Palestinians in favor of modernization sought to cooperate with Zionists, Islamist forerunners under the leadership of the Mufti Amin el-Husseini battled against every attempted agreement as a betrayal and thus enabled the overthrow of the first two state proposal in 1937.[3]

This Mufti’s legacy continues to have an effect. Those who seek a settlement with Israel still risk their lives: A total of 942 Palestinians were murdered by fellow Palestinians between 1987 and 1993 due to alleged “collaboration,” whereby 130 of these allegations involved “moral misconduct” (drug use, “prostitution”, video trafficking).[4] Is Grosser interested in these deaths as well?

The Abstract Evil

Sari Nusseibeh, the former PLO representative for Jerusalem and director of the Al-Quds University, refers to the second Intifada as “a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness” in his recently published autobiography. He accurately criticizes the Hamas charter as a document that “sounds as if it came straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.”[5] Dissidents such as Nusseibeh are not mentioned in Grosser’s essay. He views the Palestinians as the collective victim and Israel as the aggressor that commits crimes “in the name of self-defense.” Obviously, Grosser is little interested in the real policy options for Israel. When asked in an April 2007 interview in the German daily Die Tageszeitung, “Isn’t it true that Israel faces a special threat?” Grosser replied: “In my opinion: No. Israel exists.”[6]

When Iranian president Ahmadinejad refers to Israel’s obliteration as a contribution to the “liberation of humanity,” Grosser does not listen. He also turns a blind eye to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who calls Israel a “cancer” that “must be eliminated,” and to the Hamas charter, which considers the destruction of Israel to be a vow, a promise to God. Whether Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip or vacates the territory in spite of rancorous domestic opposition seems to be irrelevant to Grosser. If the Gaza Strip develops into a flourishing Palestinian model region after the withdrawal, whose inhabitants focus on peace and prosperity (as was hoped in summer 2005), or if this swathe of land turns into a militarized frontline of the war against Israel does not really matter to him either.

Essentially, the familiar black and white paradigm must remain intact. Grosser portrays Israel as the abstract evil, irrespective of what policies the Israeli government does or does not carry out—while the Palestinians stand for the abstract good, regardless of what their representatives permit or accomplish.

The Beginning of Complicity

Thus, Grosser shows understanding even for suicide terror and attributes the “willingness to commit suicide attacks” to Israeli “oppression, disrespect, and dipossession.”[7] From the offender’s perspective, Grosser’s attempt to rehabilitate the suicide bomber’s honor represents an affront. Sheik Qaradawi, the most prominent representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas is a member organization, reminds us: These “are not suicide operations. These are heroic martyrdom operations and the heroes who carry them out don’t embark on this action out of hopelessness or despair.”[8] Pride and enthusiasm are central to the suicide murderers testamentary videos, which confirm Qaradawi’s claim that they are fulfilling a religious mission.

Grosser ignores the fact that the character of the Middle East conflict has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years. A war of Weltanschauung and religion has emerged from a minor conflict between Palestinians and Zionists, which later escalated into a larger conflict between the Israelis and the Arabs. Today, Iranian-led Islamism is waging war against the Western modell of liberalism and democracy, a war that aims to destroy Israel in its first stage.

Grosser’s claim to act out of “genuine sympathy for the suffering in Gaza and in the ‘territories,’” degenerates into a sentimental gesture; he does not care about analysis, which – in its literal translation – means the dissolution of a complex problem in its individual parts. The absence of clarity, however, is the beginning of complicity. Those like Grosser who turn a blind eye to Islamist ideology—its cult of death, its anti-Semitism, its hatred of self-determination—stab every Muslim in the back who wants to prevent the Talibanization of his live. Second, they make Israel into a scapegoat for Islamist violence according to the motto: The more barbaric anti-Jewish terrorism becomes, the more outrageous Israeli guilt must be. The ancient “the Jew is guilty” stereotype is thus supplemented with a modern variant.

This type of circular argument, based on ignorance, is en vogue. A 2007 survey sponsored by the BBC shows that 77 percent of Germans negatively view Israel’s world influence. The only country in the world whose elimination is being propagated and prepared for by Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, is thus regarded as scapegoat No. 1. It is comprehensible that against this background a growing number of Jews prefer to belong to the “good Jews,” who attack Israel instead of defending it against Islamists. Why should Jews be more courageous or more prudent than non-Jews? Is, however, everyone who radically criticizes Israel at the same time an anti-Semite?

Israel is not a haven of virtue as is generally known. On one hand, Israel’s government deserves to be criticized just like every other democratically elected government in the world. On the other hand, European thinking has been influenced by anti-Semitic patterns for centuries—in this regard, no criticism of Jews or Israel is a priori immune of anti-Semitic stereotypes. At least, a European Union working definition has helped us establish a framework to evaluate when legitimate criticism stops and anti-Semitism begins: 1. When Israeli policy is equated with Nazi practices or when symbols and images of long-established anti-Semitism are assigned to Israel; 2. When Israel’s right to existence is denied; and 3. When a double standard applies and demands are made of Israel that would never be expected or demanded of another democratic state.

Those who breach this code are not necessarily supporters of Nazi anti-Semitism. They nevertheless pave the way for those who are prepared to wage a nuclear war against Israel. Hostilities against Israel appear today in the form of a pincer movement: On one side, we have anti-Semites such as Ahmadinejad or Hamas who draw their “knowledge” about Jews from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” On the other side we have non-Jewish and Jewish “fellow travellers of anti-Semitism” in progressive Western movements and governments who take up and proliferate, albeit in muted form, Iran’s attempts to delegimize Israel.

Can Alfred Grosser be located in the second camp? I will leave the answer to the discretion of the readers.
————————————————————-

[1] Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Progressive“ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, American Jewish Committee, December 2006.

[2] Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows. Palestinian Collaboration With Zionism 1917-1948, (University of California Press, 2007).

[3] On Amin el-Husseini’s role see, http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/national-socialism-and-anti-semitism-in-the-arab-world

[4] Abdul Jawahd Saleh and Yizahr Be’er “Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations” (February 1995), www.birzeit.edu/crdps .

[5] Leon Wieseltier, “Sympathy for the Other”, New York Times Book Review, April 1, 2007.

[6] Interview with Alfred Grosser, “Ich muss als Jude nicht für Israel sein”, Die Tageszeitung, April 4, 2007.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Anti-Defamation League, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Theologican of Terror, August 1, 2005, see: www.adl.org .

Zeyad and more on Charlie Rose

2007-05-17T00:55:00.000+09:00

Charlie Rose interviews Ali Fadhil, Ayub Nuri, and Zeyad Kasim on journalism and Iraq.

Also: some sort of 'Marxist' insurgent group pops up in Iraq's south. Problematic politics,

resistance against American, British and Zionist occupiers in order to liberate Iraq and form a free socialist, democratic alternative

but a vast improvement from the sadistic fascists of Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'l Jihad, the Mahdi Army etc.

Add this to the movement in the awakening councils and there may be signs of hope in Iraq amid the awning darkness.

Precarious workers and the cyber-homeless - Mayday march in Japan

2007-05-12T00:32:00.000+09:00

(Ripped from libcom. Regretfully, I've been more or less silent about events in Japan, mostly because I don't particularly try to expose the struggles that I'm involved in to unnecessary attention. Also, I want to have a firm grip on something before I critique it. Right now, the Japanese left is stagnant, in similar ways to the left worldwide, but with its own problematics. My neglect of important subjects like these poses the problem of slipping into theoretical poverty. That's why after this article, I plan to write a bit more on the theme below of the casualised working class and after which move on to a multi-part article about the structure and cultural codes of Japanese fascism. Thanks to comrades and regular readers of the blog.)

There are 2.3 million young casualised and part-time workers in Japan.

Takeshi Yamashita does not look like a homeless person. From his carefully distressed jeans to his casual-cool navy striped T-shirt, he is every bit the trendy Tokyoite. Yet the 26-year-old has been sleeping in a reclining seat in an Internet cafe every night for the past month since he lost his steady office job and his apartment. It's cheaper than a hotel, offers access to the Internet and hundreds of Manga comic books, and even has a microwave and a shower where he can wash in the morning before heading off to one of his temporary jobs ranging from cleaning to basic office work.

Yamashita is one of Japan's many "freeters" -- a compound of "free" and "Arbeiter," the German word for "worker." A by-product of the economic crisis that hit Japan and its lifelong employment guarantees in the 1990s, freeters drift between odd jobs.

Now the economy is recovering, but many freeters are missing out on the upswing after years of unskilled work. Most expanding companies prefer to recruit fresh university graduates or transfer basic jobs to low-wage countries such as China.(yahoo news, May 7 2007)

Comprising freelance workers who live on earnings split between several jobs, and other temporary workers, day labourers, over the past two decades the numbers of freeters keeps increasing. The economic downturn that hit Japan in the 1990s has lead to permanent changes in employment practice - like elsewhere, jobs for life are long gone. Casualised low wage work has become the realityfor a wide range of young workers today; Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world and high rents mean that a short period of unemployment can soon put workers on the streets. Dubbed the 'cyber-homeless', an unknown number of workers now survive for varying periods by sleeping nightly in internet cafe cubicles.

Paying 1,400 to 2,400 yen ($12-$20/£6-10/EU8.8-14.7)) for a night in a central Internet cafe, each cubicle provides a reclining seat or sofa, a blanket, computer and clothes hanger. Free soft drinks, TV, comics and Internet access are included -- and prices are cheaper than those of Japan's famous "capsule hotels," where guests sleep in plastic cells.

There is no official data on the cyber cafe homeless. Japan's Welfare Ministry plans a wider study on the phenomenon, according to a newspaper report, but in the meantime, it is hard to gauge the scope of the problem or its social impact. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many are freeters in their mid-to-late-twenties, who stay in a net cafe for a couple of months before settling for a more permanent housing solution.

Those who are older, poorer, with fewer chances of escaping their drifting lifestyle, and sometimes too embarrassed to return home, find themselves at the very bottom of cyber-society. They congregate in run-down Tokyo suburbs such as Kamata, renting poorly ventilated, smoke-filled cubicles with reclining seats for 100 yen an hour.
"It's very uncomfortable. You can't really sleep," said one Kamata cafe guest who preferred not to be named.

Those who are poorer still, both homeless and workless, live in the 'cardboard cities' of the major towns.

(All this is not so very different from what is happening now in London, an even more expensive city. Last week it was reported that East European immigrant workers were sleeping in public toilet cubicles in Hackney - at 20p a night with free washing facilities, by far the cheapest rent in town for the low-paid casualised worker. Dreams of economic advancement can quickly shatter against hard reality...)

'Rengo', the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, comments on the freeters;

Emerging Problems of Freeters (Freelance Part-Time Workers) and NEETs (Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training)
Due to high turnover (the so-called 7/5/3 phenomenon*) among young workers, their unemployment ratio remains as high as 10%. Freeters amount to 2.13 million, increasing by 100,000 a year, while NEETs are reported to number 640,000. 40% of freeters receive financial assistance from their parents and siblings, and their marriage rate is lower than that of non-freeters. They have emerged as a social problem not only from the concern of their impoverishment due to low wages but also because they could gravely undermine the social security system through their positioning outside of the coverage of pension and health insurance plans.

(* 7/5/3 phenomenon: 70% of secondary school graduates, 50% of high school graduates and 30% of university graduates terminate employment within 3 years of entering a company.)

The proportion of youth NEET has more than doubled since doubled since 1990. This includes those suffering from the 'Hikkomori' (literally; 'shut-ins') syndrome; "One million Japanese, or almost 1 percent of the population, are estimated to suffer from hikikomori, defined as a withdrawal from friends and family for months or even years. Some 40 percent of hikikomori are below the age of 21." Western psychologists have compared it to extreme social anxiety and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces). On the Mayday march described below a banner declared "Hikikomori also have a right to life".

A MAYDAY MARCH OF THE 'PRECARIAT''
On April 30th in Tokyo a march entitled “MayDay for Freedom and Lives” took place in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Subtitled “Resistance of the Precariat”, over 400 people took part, including freeters, part timers, day labourers and homeless, who all live with neither security nor stability. The May Day march has been organised for the past four years by the “Freeters’ General Union” to publicise and protest the problems of the precariat.

Despite tight policing the procession marched through the city to a busy shopping centre. The main feature of this event was a "Sound Demo"; the 400 demonstrators dancing to music while yelling and voicing their discontent.

A demonstrator commented;
"Talking does not make any difference, and I had to take action, so I went to a demonstration for the first time in my life. I learned and discovered so many things.
.... More than one third of the entire working population is made up of non-full time workers. In other words, even if they wish, one third of all people cannot be employed full time. .... Is this such a serious fault that they deserve to become homeless or even starve to death?"

After the march, a "Precariat talk session and interchange" took place where many different experiences and views were exchanged.

2007-05-10T17:53:00.000+09:00

Towards a Marxist theory of Fascism and National Socialism: A Report on Developments in West Germany by Anson G. Rabinbach

Re-adjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism by Shulamit Volkov

Don't miss these.

(If you happen to have a claim to the property rights of either of the above files, make sure to email me so I can tell you to fuck right off)

May Day in Baghdad

2007-05-02T14:49:00.000+09:00

Hope still burns in Iraq.

From Zeyad.

Pour out a little liquor for the '9/11 truth movement'*

2007-05-02T02:09:00.001+09:00

That's right, thanks to a truck driver in Oakland, we've finally arrived at the twilight for one of the most embarrassing American social 'movements' to have ever existed, the 9/11 'truth movement'. United by the central paranoia that 'something's just not right' about the massacre of thousands of people by Islamists on September 11th, truthers were able to cross political divides to come up with the most empty and distracting 'critique' that the American ruling class could possibly hope for. The left, which was looking for something more 'radical' than the superficial political economy on hand with the anti-war movement, was ready for the mystery meat of Alex Jones' (and others') cafeteria. Armed with the truth, they could now march with radical signs. Now they were digging deeper. The new critique took every aspect of existing society for granted in order to bury itself in forensics, in an almost monomaniacal search for the 'real killers'. Accordingly, an extraordinarily elaborate system of justifications was drawn up and distributed collectively, as a mode of participation....in something! The critique no doubt felt confrontational, since the dogma collectively prepared and re-hashed on the internet had to be disseminated within the anti-war movement through obscurantist arguments about the melting point of steel, the angle of incidence of security cameras etc. Hard work was demanded for all involved in constructing multiple fail safes in case the most obvious idiocies couldn't stand on two feet!

How tragic then that this enormous monument to crawling up one's own ass in self-refential 'scientism' now meets its end with the conclusive debunking of the 'movement's' central 'premise' i.e. that a free fire could not melt (or weaken) structural steel sufficiently to cause a structure to collapse.

Welcome to Oakland.

(CBS/AP) A heavily traveled section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and erupted into flames, authorities said.

Flames shot 200 feet in the air and the heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck's driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. No other injuries were reported.

"I've never seen anything like it," Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said of the crumpled interchange. "I'm looking at this thinking, 'Wow, no one died — that's amazing. It's just very fortunate."

Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.

It was Fark.com visitors who immediately picked up on the implications for conspiracy theory in this story, where fire had clearly weakened steel (enough to collapse a freeway overpass), proving that the 'theories' popularized by Loose Change et al (that the twin towers could only have collapsed via pre-set demolition charges since fires inside the buildings could not have reached an adequate temperature to weaken the structure) are utterly false and hereby proven so physically. No longer disproven only by mere circumstancial evidence such as the fact that a conspiracy of such a magnitude couldn't possibly be kept secret, as argued brilliantly by George Monbiot, and not merely by the fact that the conspiracy theory in question had to be studiously invented with ugly and visible stitch marks avoiding Occam's razor all the way...now after the Oakland fire, the only conspiracy theorists left are in fact actual conspiracists, engaged in an ongoing racket of inventing their own reality where they enjoy all the benefits of science without the pre-requisite of critically analyzing reality. Thus for them, the object of critique becomes the method of critique.

But this is no loss for the CT fringe, which of course existed in nuclei in variously libertarian, gun-clutching, anti-semitic and white supremacist guises far before people convinced themselves that the perpetrators of 9/11 were innocent of their greatest accomplishment. No, these lunatics will retreat back to exactly that line of acceptability that still permits them audience in the country historically responsible for the defeat of mid-century fascism. For the CTs it was an important foray, because their way of thinking was spread to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide (and the pre-requisite for the anti-semetic critique was laid; as a Fark poster put it, "Just blame the Jews and get it over with"). Daniel Kulla writes,

Any historian will abhor the inept mechanical history, any political scientist the personalisation, any social scientist the ignorance against the majority of people, any journalist the poor research - but by doing so they play the game. Conspirationists do not want to show the experts that they are equal or better experts, they seek recognition via the audience. They might break the rules applying for the respective profession but that is only of interest for those who are subject to these rules themselves, not for the layperson readers, TV watchers, cinema goers or event attenders. They will most often not know about these rules and with high probability they will be influenced in their judgement by conspirationist shindig, the pretension of authority I refer to as ‘travesty’. Sometimes if not often the audience will consider the conspirationist copy of science, history or journalism to be more scientific or adequate than the original.

Conspirationism manages to over-optimally emulate socially relevant structures on the level of their appearance. From their more or less marginal position, German protagonists of conspirationism usually present predigested information from US conspirology sources in a way that it forms a more consistent story and a more perfect system which then can be blamed for any personal failure. Having been defeated by these enormous historical powers makes any defeat somewhat heroic, but makes sure that no personal consequences are drawn from that defeat.

Conspiracy theory is the acceptance of defeat for the struggle against daily capitalist exploitation. It is loyalty to spectacular events that supposedly dictate everything but in fact draw power from our obsession with them. Marx described the dialectical method as a movement from the abstract to the concrete to the abstract to the concrete, progressively wearing away at levels of abstraction. In this case, the abstract was melted by the concrete, and society has the chance now to regain its senses and oppose the outrageous state of affairs that only survives by distraction.

*Note: I drink motherfucking Kirin Grand Ale, and it costs me an extra 30 yen for a smaller bottle of better beer. I'm not about to waste any of it on the 3rd grade physics of the 9/11 'truth' movement; hence the empty bottle.

2007-04-28T18:40:00.000+09:00

Loren Goldner speaks on the crisis of American Capitalism

2007-04-07T21:41:00.001+09:00

Live on KPFA's "Guns and Butter", definitely worth giving an attentive listening to.

I promised to put up some comments and I'm afraid that they are mostly just scribblings, trying to catch up with the obviously deep pool of knowledge that Loren is working with. I've been inspired by this broadcast to deepen my own understanding of financial markets, and especially how American and Japanese capitalists contain crises through them. Give it a listen, I'm sure it will give you food for thought (and action).

Goldner opens by describing the post-September 11th wars as among other things, American capitalists "running forward to avoid crisis in the rear", which is characterized by the need to prop up the dollar standard internationally, and therefore assert American military influence. The crises of the dollar standard stems chiefly from the expansion of lines of credit to American consumers, one expression of this being the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

This is an example of the consumer-centered expansion that American capital underwent after WWII, a process that was pregnant with contradictions, because while simultaneously allowing for increased working class consumption, the consumer boom increased imports from places like China, East Asia and the Middle East, creating a dependency relationship of US capital on these economies for their low-priced commodities, and the reverse, a massive investiture of third world capital in the US dollar.

In the post-war world, the new international system was backed by the dollar, which became the international currency standard when the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971 by the US. Goldner mentions how this gave the US a unique vantage of being able to inflate or deflate the world economy by withholding or printing dollars. And yet, the reconstructed economies such as Germany and Japan, as well as America's ballooning trade deficit (from 1 trillion to 4 in the Reagan era) were soon to threaten this hegemony. Not to mention that, when national inflation hit the states, those foreign countries that held stock in US treasury bonds or dollars generally began to feel the decline in value of their investments.

The 1960s also saw a renewed cycle of working class wildcat strikes and struggles, such as the wildcats of the Appalachian coal miners, which helped push the American energy sector into a search for foreign sources of energy. Goldner describes third world accumulation movements like these as 'looting'. He points out that this looting is simultaneously a local feature of the domestic capitalist economy. Not only is loot found internationally in countries with cheaper wages and natural resources, but also inside the US, by looting what seems to the capitalist class to be unnecessary for immediate reproduction: social services, education, health care, pensions etc. Labor from the third world is also brought in as loot, in order to bring domestic wages down.

Goldner mentions that by the end of the 1960s, socially necessary labor time had been reduced to such an extent by gains in productivity that it could be superseded by a better system (communism). Although the preconditions for such a revolution were present in this period, one did not occur. What did happen was an international revolt of the working class against older forms of fordist labor such as the assembly line.

That absence of revolution leads problematically to what Goldner describes as 'real retrogression', wherein capital turns on society in order to 'loot' when it has reached a barrier of expansion (of course capital also 'escapes' and flows into other countries in search of cheap labor and raw materials). Goldner makes it clear that this crisis begins in the sphere of production and not in the sphere of circulation (the anti-globalization movement holds the reverse to be true). He describes how capitalism undermines the paper value of things, wherein real depreciation (not only physical depreciation but relative depreciation via falling average fixed capital prices) of assets lead to attacks on wages. This happens because the loans for these now-depreciated assets have to be repaid at the same amount they were taken out at. When this occurs at an industry level, you have the beginnings of a crisis.

He mentions the ambitions for a leisure society in the 1960s and how this ideal has mostly been forgotten. Certainly it is almost a taboo in this country (Japan) to even come out in favor of leisure. Working long, unrewarding overtime hours is simply de-facto. The initiative to investigate the circumstances that demand these sacrifices is also nearly non-existent. So it's good to see that someone is still willing to shout out loud that this turn away from leisure is absolutely a 'real retrogression'.

My curiosity was peaked when Goldner mentions Brzezinski's statement that East Asia represents the main potential rival to the United States. Surely there are already movements in Japan towards a base anti-Americanism, and if what we are seeing today in Iraq, with the bombing of the Green Zone and the anti-enlightenment nationalist/Islamist insurgency continuing appeal, American power is in severe decline. One of the key allies of the American government is Japan, whose SDF have been dutifully carrying munitions on cargo planes for the Americans after having a remarkably unsuccessful go at reconstructing Iraq's Samawah province. Today we can see the changing shape of imperial relations, with Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo welcoming Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Tokyo. The absolute media spectacle accompanying this visit is a site to behold. The morning and evening news were almost filled with pissant images of Wen sauntering about Kyoto looking at Koi and saying 'delicious' after being fed things. It's almost hilarious to watch Abe's government making this effort to heal wounds with the same East Asian countries that have been relentlessly demonized in the Japanese media for years. But China's continual neo-liberal reforms mean that its economy is attractive for Japan in particular but also other countries, and its military power has the potential to put down not only domestic unrest, as it does regularly (never forget that this man is a butcher) but also revolt or separatism in East Asia at large.

Back to the subject at hand, following his analysis of American decline, Goldner recommends Emmanuel Todd's "After Empire" which examines this collapse. To combat the decay of confidence in the dollar, Goldner argues that creating chaos in certain sections of the world would serve US interests in keeping the world from bolting away from the dollar-dominated financial economy. Obviously this is true to a certain extent, although the word 'chaos' is too vague and prone to manipulation.* American policy abroad is, like any capitalist-driven endeavor, not driven by vague dart throwing, but by finding the path of least resistance, the local ruling class that will cooperate for the least amount of blood and treasure. The support given by the American government to the death squad-linked Iraqi governments (especially Maliki) as well as past support for the Afghan mujahideen, Chechen nationalists and so on, has certainly created 'chaos', but this chaos is actually imperialist warfare. Now after four years of war in Iraq, the Americans have turned to arming local ruling classes in place of direct intervention. This can be seen most recently in the American effort to upgrade Saudi Arabia's military for what will ultimately be the regional war whose contours have been visible at least since the second Lebanon war.

Goldner, however, reminds us that there is still a path out of the barbarism that characterizes the methods and compromises of the imperialists and the anti-imperialists, that a society organized on truly socially necessary work time is still possible, and that such a society could eliminate the market imperative to an average rate of profit, one which produces an uncontainable pressure within the capitalist economy that, as history has shown, leads to crisis, which can only be overcome by an outward push for loot or domestic cannibalization. The society that could overcome this violence is still called communism, despite the liars who claim its mantel even today.

Break their Haughty Power (Loren Goldner's website)
Left Communism and Trotskyism: A Roundtable

*We could note how much a counter-productive focus on conspiracy and chaos can distort analysis, leading to the sad situation where even 'Guns and Butter', the show that hosted the interview, with an obviously intelligent host, is deeply immersed in conspiracy theorist ideology. See their archives for some examples of "real retrogression": http://www.gunsandbutter.net/archives.php

2007-04-02T23:02:00.000+09:00

Fire destroys Neturei Karta synagogue, rabbi's residence in NY
By The Associated Press

A fire deemed suspicious destroyed a New York suburban synagogue of an
anti-Zionist Jewish group heavily criticized for attending a conference last year where participants debated whether the Holocaust occurred.

No one was injured in Sunday night's fire in the town of Monsey. A senior Neturei Karta rabbi and his family, who lived on the top floor of the three-story structure, were not home.

"It may in the future be found to be accidental, but at this time we're treating it as a suspicious fire and we're investigating it as such," said Sgt. Daniel Hyman of the Ramapo Police Department, which provides services to Monsey, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of New York City.

The Neturei Karta has been the target of threats in the recent past because of their involvement in the anti-Zionism movement. The group has been widely criticized by other Jewish groups.

"Anybody who would like to reveal to the world their opposition to this political, national movement of Zionism is attacked," said Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta.

"A call of a fire in the kitchen area of the three-story structure came in to authorities at about 8:12 P.M. Sunday," Monsey Fire Chief Douglas Perry said.

He said that when firefighters arrived, one side of the house was engulfed in flames and power lines had come down. "It was too dangerous for any entry," he said, and the fire had to be fought from the outside.

"It's totaled," Perry said. "I would deem it dangerous to even go inside."

Weiss said that the group suspects arson because of previous threats.

"There's no question that the issue is to stifle the opposition to Zionism," he said.

In December, about five members of the group traveled to Tehran for a two-day conference convened to debate whether the Holocaust occurred. Some were photographed meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth and has criticized the existence of Israel. Other Jewish groups were outraged.

Following the group's return from Iran, a large protest made up mostly of other Jews opposing their anti-Zionist views was held outside the Monsey synagogue. Neturei Karta refuses to recognize the existence or authority of Israel on the grounds that a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish law.

"The group does not dispute that the Holocaust occurred," Weiss said.

Civilization Embattled

2007-03-19T08:57:00.000+09:00

Welcome to Baghdad (via Zeyad, and Iraqi Mojo)

時事論

2007-02-22T00:55:00.000+09:00

Egyptian workers in unprecedented strike wave

Ali Ghalab sat on a dusty office couch in a pinstriped suit, explaining why his 11,700 employees joined a wave of wildcat strikes that have shocked the government and paralyzed Egypt's textile industry.
"It's the Muslim Brotherhood," the factory chairman yelled, referring to the officially banned Islamist movement, "and the communists. The Muslim Brotherhood stands behind every trouble in every single factory."

A mile away, more than 1,000 strikers had barricaded themselves inside the textile plant in Kafr el-Dawwar, a gritty town on the Nile Delta about 100 miles north of Cairo. They were demanding more money and greater opportunity for promotion. A shipment of cotton fabric destined for Turkey was locked inside with the disgruntled employees.

"Ali is a shoe," they chanted. "He is useless."

Rattled by rising prices, falling benefits and looming privatization, tens of thousands of Egyptian workers at state-owned industries have been in rebellion. In recent weeks, more than 35,000 workers at nearly a dozen textile, cement and poultry plants have gone on strike in a nation where any strike is illegal and even the smallest public protest can be squelched with police truncheons. Train engineers, miners and even riot police also have walked off the job or held demonstrations in the past 2 1/2 months.

Also,

Long live Israel

"What governments should really fear is a communications expert."

2007-02-18T02:47:00.000+09:00

I thought I'd give a brief highlight to the person who introduced me (and many others) to the ideas of anti-German communists, an oppositional current that emerged in the early 1990s around the Gulf war and has provided a powerful counter-weight to a left incapable of breaking with the macromass of the nation. In this sense, they continue the important work of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Theodor Adorno, Klaus Theweleit and other intellectuals who confronted in the course of their struggle the universal demobilizing force of the nation-state and the particular counter-revolutionary character of the German nation.

CF argues with a persuasive and researched polemic which does not surrender to easy anti-imperialist logic or for that matter "history's end". His 'regular' writings can be read in the magazine datacide (issue 9 being the latest, and recommended). His position on Iraq in hindsight did not take into account the brutality of the American occupation (which works directly against the working class) nor foresee the Islamist/Ba'athist insurgence, but still has some interesting insights.

Jörg Haider on Al Jazeera

Why I won't be at the Peace March

The war has begun

"see here i disagree, I think neo-nazis are revolutionaries but in a totally different way than communists (should be), they want to revolutionise society into something much worse than it already is, the same is the case with the islamists they sympathise so much with.
I plead for a revolutionary movement that is entirely un-compatible with the nazi concepts, i'm not interested in a nazi-compatible left."

Notes on an Ongoing Workplace Struggle (part 2)

2007-02-08T20:57:00.000+09:00

6. How will the employees, who do not possess the experience of dissent, evade the despotic organization of the workplace which on the one hand threatens to crush them and on the other hand to integrate them? It is true that any advance into organization made by individuals who have never considered withdrawing their labor will proceed cautiously. A workplace staffed by those who consider themselves integrated (not interchangeable) to its functions will tend towards extreme vertical relations of authority since the employees do not steadfastly insist on separation. The vertical relations are outwardly dormant, needing to operate in the open only when an employee or a group of them posits themselves in stark contrast to the organization and maintenance of the workplace. Normally, this is when disciplinary action is taken in order to circumvent future disruption, since when a person communicates their frustration to others and finds a similar echo, the command structure in place is worked around. The structure is also threatened

a) by horizontal communication unoccupied with modifying work processes to enhance efficiency
and

b) by the threat of stoppage, arising less from any possible strike, but from work time lost to this communication, its expansion, any meetings necessary to contain it and of course the threat of potential compromises down the line.

What acts first against the menace of communication then? Not the manager or the section supervisors, not directly (too obvious). Actually, the first line of defense will be the socialization of the employees which has already been instilled in them. This socialization allows for formations against the individual who imposes herself socially (with demands rooted outside of the workplace).

All of the employees have learned to speak in a certain way. Senior employees for instance have learned exactly how to compose themselves, which furrowed looks cross the lines of disloyalty, what words cannot be spoken, and so on, they've learned all this through hard circumstance. Thus every expression and vocalization made by the worker, who embarks on an inquiry inviting conflict with the workplace's organization, initially walks along the two options that do not cross workplace taboos i.e. quitting or making 'suggestions' (not yet demands). These two obvious options allow the individual to remove herself from the workplace totally and dissolve into the wider society, or to demand concessions at the cost of re-integration. Thus, any struggle in the integrated workplace (specifically the tech industry) begins with inquiries that walk the line between liquidation and re-integration. The power that limits the individual to these two options so far goes unquestioned. More likely this bordering power is mystified as 'honor' or 'respect'. She reasons: "the company is the company I signed a contract with. I may disagree with it and attempt to reform it, but if that doesn't work, or if management delays and delays, I'll simply leave. That's more honorable. I could leave and still respect myself that way."

To escape these two options, which she recognizes as miserable, she has to exit her socialization (which is ruled by these choices) as she has known it. The possibility of radically staying in the workplace must be explored. While she stays she can experiment, locating weak points in the immediate relations of power. How much of my ribbing will the supervisor take? How can I alter the work uniform slightly to see if others follow my lead? Can I refuse to do overtime or has no one simply ever tried?

Conversations are held in the bathroom, over e-mail and go on with a great deal of sardonic laughter. She fields the complaints of others and listens to them. Taboo subjects are secularized. Objects that were previously immobile and fixed are moved around. Section chiefs find their chairs swapped out or the coffee machine moved closer to the workers' section. The periodicals library, stocked with PC Mag, Macworld and so on, is entirely replaced with video game and fashion magazines. A scandalous parody of a supervisor appears in the women's bathroom, where the supervisor can't go. Moving gregariously, the worker appropriates and demystifies office objects and relationships. This workplace blasphemy conveys itself through humor. Whoever laughs is a potential ally. Humor is another instance where collective communication (e-mail, message boards etc.) cannot be silenced without revealing an obvious despotism.

The employee sets out critiquing what she finds with the allies she meets and the networks they establish. First quietly, through e-mail, on break or after work at a drinking party. In critiquing, she moves like a person who wants to dance in a room of still people. Confident that others want to dance too, she starts moving her knees before her moving her legs. When relationships of trust develop, the employees invite each other out after work, on the weekend, sometimes even to their private worlds (apartments, hang-outs, gardens) where their life projects are fed by the money they receive for their labor. Previously isolated individuals reveal to each other that the rewards of gainful employment are simply means. In so doing, they suddenly separate themselves from the workplace radically. They relate their life stories and discover a commonness which was previously unspeakable. As if they were observing a wall of TV monitors showing scenes of men and women pushing through subway gates, they realize that what was so irretrievably first-person is now external, that their individual sacrifices to arrive at 'gainful employment' have always been near duplicates of the sacrifices of others to arrive at that same 'success'. They are surprised to learn that they all peek at the internet when the supervisor goes to the bathroom.

The individual worker discusses her suffering with others who have different sufferings. Some convergence points are found: the arrogance of the supervisor (that fuck!), work conditions (as if we were slaves!), the wage rate (I can't pay my rent!), the amount of hours worked (I never see my children!), the absence of physical activity in mental labor (I've grown so weak). They arrive back in the workplace, more confident.

Despite these valuable convergences, they find that their dissent takes its strength from its disunity (the collective groan). Dissatisfaction remains in a clamor because the clamor holds the most potential. As the dissatisfied begin to express themselves, supervisors, managers, quality circles etc. are interrupted with complaints and dissent. Face-to-face meetings become difficult to manage. The supervisors promise they'll 'try to get to the bottom of things'. Elsewhere, the message board and e-mail are alive with a visible frustration that seems to have no handles. Some workers express themselves through absenteeism ('Out sick today' or even 'I'm simply exhausted'), others peek at the internet when the supervisor cannot see or occupy themselves with something or other on 'company time' (in Japan, this is referred to as naishoku, wheedling away at private projects on company time). With enough volume, persistence and coordination (taking place on work-time), the supervisors feel compelled to intervene to rescue productivity. They attempt to shuck away the frustration and anger which aims at everything and look for what is unifiable (even before they look for what is "possible").

7. To amplify their clamor, which has no necessary unity, the employees must try to seize objective moments of opportunity which occur outside of their control but present a venue for critiquing the workplace. These moments are unpredictable yet may have a pattern that develops out of the dissent thriving in the office. For instance, one, two, three employees may quit in quick succession, as in my workplace. More simply, a flood of work may come through that exceeds the normal workload and the employees judge it to be intolerable. A supervisor may say something rude to an employee. An incident of sexual harassment may occur. In critiquing objective moments, the employees learn to vocalize themselves and their dissatisfaction, and also to act on the moment. This breaks the silence of the technological workplace, a pre-requisite for engineering innovation (concentrate!), and diminishes the importance of e-mail and other substitute communication methods. Vocal interruptions recompose the employees as critics of their own responsibilities. Initiative lies with them, not the supervisor structure, which slowly finds itself without an audience.

This is because so far, the employees have grounded their words in their private (and therefore social) difference with the workplace (the groan) while holding back on specificity. They know that their power lies in the potential for workplace disruption and lost work time. Their grievances, which have become social, must retain their wholeness and not collapse back onto anti-social ground i.e. how can the company 'solve the problems'.

8. Management's main line of defense against the accumulating groan which seems to have no source is linguistic attack. Supervisors attempt to adapt the antagonism into a dialogue between two powers, and this adaption takes place on the field of vocabulary. They try to change complaints such as 'I'm always so exhausted' into 'What if we implemented 15 minute breaks every four hours?', or 'The workload is killing me' into 'Let's make the work flow more efficient', and 'I'm rotting not moving all day' into 'Let's sponsor 50% of employee gym memberships!'. Every meeting held to mediate worker frustrations is a venue for this kind of re-wording. Mainly the supervisors will press these 'subtle' linguistic changes outside of the collective venue and on a person-to-person level within the workplace (or at group dinners where conviviality is implied). The employees, who are not unified in their demands, must maintain the heterogeneity of their critiques and refuse their integration into easy solutions. A workplace at a certain level of dissatisfaction forebodes dysfunction and lost capital. Such a situation will always force management, or an intermediate, to come running with proposals for compromises. At this point, having refused to present unified demands can allow:

a. The formation of a collective struggle for individual demands instead of a collective struggle for collective demands. This allows the employees a unity from which to attack collectively in the form of slow-downs, absentia or even a strike if individual demands (which already include collective demands) are not met via individual consultations. At the same time, the employees evade the attempts of the company to bind concessions to a restored or even increased loyalty.

b. The preservation of the different vectors of those individual demands (from the housewife to the recent graduate, the part-time artist to the workaholic) also preserves the social nature of the confrontation, which takes place at one location of a circuit on which individuals confront capital (other locations being housing [rent, mortgage], transport [fares] and so on). In protecting their individual demands, the employees build ladders outside of their office windows. Outside is the city.

9. At some stage however the employees will be brought into a meeting with the supervisors. Hopefully they will have had the foresight to refuse to elect 'representatives' for negotiating on their behalf, and the meeting will feature the numerical advantage of the frustrated. Management will open by emphasizing its openness and 'flexibility', although the purpose of the meeting is to quiet dissent in the office. The employees who have been strong through their cacophony have limited goals here. They must show themselves willing to take action (or worse) maintain demoralization if not provided with individual consultation and satisfaction. They must also prevent the supervisors from ordering the proceedings and asserting the office as management's terrain. True enough, the meeting is management's terrain. It is structured linguistically to ensnare the employees, who will be questioned and asked to come up with solutions for draining their own antagonism.

In such a setting, the workers can invert the 'serious efforts' of management via sarcasm and skepticism, which are methods of critique that don't stand on any ground, moving with a mocking breeze. For the employees, the meeting is no place for 'pointing out contradictions'. Here, every contradiction has an explanation and every problem a solution. When a solution is not favorable to the employees, they may be forced to threaten action while on very weak ground. A 'ceaseless advance' of angry confrontation will no doubt be advocated by people who maintain themselves by organizing others (unionists). No. Here the employees should choose a passive withdrawal, one that does not delight itself in the concessions made by the management (which could suddenly make 'the concessions' into contractual guarantees of hard work!), nor acknowledge the 'unity of demands' among the collective groan that management has endeavored to create. The passive withdrawal is active because it refuses to comment, never mind integrate. The workers remain intransigent. Paradoxically, the potential for a contiguous struggle that wants to protect itself from being mutilated thus hinges on a retreat that refuses capture.

10. The workers, who now have no obstacles towards a sustained and much wider conflict (because they have not been bound) must at this point retreat from the workplace and locate similar antagonists in the wider social context. Not only because their own office is duplicated across the social terrain, and by making links to those in similar circumstances, they strengthen themselves. The workers must also explore the poles of capital they confront beyond the workplace, looking for weak points that amplify the struggles they already wage. In doing so, they meet others much like them. Group lunches are arranged on the roofs of the city.

When they have made inquiries at every end of the structures which regulate them, they begin naturally to do the most dangerous thing possible, to theorize themselves and their labor. 'Why do I work for a wage?' 'Why can I not live comfortably without one?' 'What do we make here?' 'Why are we making it?' 'How are we making it and why do we make it that way?' Like this, their struggle in the workplace, which was once so unspeakable, has given them room to breathe against the suffocation of all the coercions they endure. With the space that they have carved out, they begin to re-arrange what is in front of them.

Iraqi Freedom Congress in Japan

2007-01-27T01:26:00.000+09:00

It was my great pleasure to hear Suhad Ali and Amjad Al Jawhary of the Iraqi Freedom Congress (IFC) speak in Osaka last month. Although the presence of the left in the ongoing sectarian violence sweeping Iraq is negligible, the IFC has at least attempted to bridge ever-deepening sectarian chasms in the name of classic social democratic ideals (freedom of speech, freedom of women, a free press, opposition to discrimination, and so on). Much of the IFC's activity is by now outside of Iraq, not surprising given that 15% of Iraq's population has become refugees in Jordan, Syria and other states. I had seen a representative of the IFC speak in Tokyo about two years ago, and she was based in Australia at the time. So it was refreshing to hear direct perspectives from Suhad Ali who is a young university student in Iraq (in one of Mosul or Baghdad...can't remember).

The topic of the evening was 'standing in solidarity with Iraqi women' and so Suhad's speech focused on the plight of women in Baghdad, who are daily confronted with a snaking civil war waged by sectarians whose only commonality may be there desire to control and subjugate the women of Iraq. Below, I reproduce some of my notes from the talk, which are by no means complete and do not give justice to the descriptions of internecine mayhem that Ali and Jawhary were able to give the audience.

Since the war has begun, over 3.5 million Iraqis have become refugees.
Amid the chaos borne by armed factions vying for post-occupation power, rapes are widely reported and in Baghdad no neighborhoods are safe for women to go out at night. Death penalties by stoning have been enforced against women judged to have breached chastity, betrayed their husbands, or otherwise failed to perform feudal duties.
The IFC has a variety of events worked out for March 8th, International Women's day.
Some Shiite groups are practicing what are known as 'temporary marriages', which Suhad Ali described as a form of prostitution in which a woman is sold into a household where she is expected to perform domestic responsibilities and 'serve her husband'. This practice had been banned in Ba'athi Iraq and was practiced in Islamic Iran, but has now became widespread in central and southern Iraq in the chaotic social setting.
The IFC has created several social centres (mainly in Kurdistan) which instruct women and others in the use of computers, job skills, English language, seminars in culture, politics and so on.
There are no effective shelters for women in distress to utilize and so IFC offices in the country have become default places of refuge. Women are sheltered there for several days until they can be sent north or even out of the country and resettled. In Kirkuk and other cities they are often received by families working with the IFC who help them put a life together in the north. Those who seek asylum in other countries, especially Turkey and Jordan face a long and uncertain wait for status.
Much of Muqtada Al Sadr's power stems from the huge unemployment rate prevailing in Iraq, in place of which his Mahdi Army provides an income for those who will take up the armed struggle.
Discrimination by sectarian affiliation has reached the point of separatism in public schools enforced by various militias but especially the Mahdi Army.
The ministry of health is controlled by the Sadrists. 1018 doctors have fled the country and an additional 3,000 have fled to Kurdistan.
Religious militias see fit to determine to determine what subjects women are allowed to study (where they are allowed to study).
Women are used as cannon fodder in the ongoing sectarian conflict. 1,000s of cases have been reported of Shiite and Sunni gangs or tribes kidnapping a woman and raping her, ruining her 'honor', which in turn dirties the 'honor' of the tribe. The tribe then follows the obligations of tradition which requires that such a woman be executed.
Much of the fundamentalist violence against women stems from their position within the Sharia which ranks women in a hierarchy from man-->children-->woman, placing her at the very bottom of the family and therefore society.
In one such case, in which a woman was kidnapped, raped and tortured for three days and then returned to her family, the IFC intervened to prevent her execution. She relocated to Kurdistan.
Students at universities in Basra and other cities have been directly requested not to go to school by the Sadrists. When students did not obey this order, a woman was isolated and shot in the head of front of hundreds of students. Zeyad at Healing Iraq has written an account that goes much beyond this particular anecdote.

"Sucked up in a sectarian vortex they can never escape, students in Iraq face enemies from all sides. Sadrist militias took over this particular university a long time ago. Posters of religious symbols filled lecture halls. A black religious flag flew above the university’s main tower. Girls were told to cover up, not just in veils, as was the case last year, but in ‘abayas, or full Islamic body garb. College texts were tampered with. Student unions became fronts for militiamen, who replaced former Ba’athist unions and threatened students and professors alike for any reason. Professors were kicked out, because they were of the wrong sect or political ideology, and many were abducted and assassinated. Just days ago, there were rumours that three female students from the university were kidnapped, tortured and raped before they were killed by militiamen. However, some students insisted to complete their studies, even though attendance rates in Baghdad have fallen to less than 30%. Dozens of academics were abducted and went missing in one recent incident when gunmen in police uniform stormed an educational institution.

As if all that was not enough, Sunni insurgent groups distributed pamphlets recently, calling on college students and professors to boycott their universities. Ironically, they called it a “campaign to support our scientists and students in Baghdad universities.” Students were warned not to attend their classes because universities have turned into headquarters of militias and death squads. “Save the lives of our professors and dear students from the rejectionist government of Maliki and their death squads,” one pamphlet said. “It is prohibited to attend after this announcement.” Another one featured a photo of the very main gate of Mustansiriya University, where the bombings took place yesterday, reading, “From these universities, our scientists graduated. And today they are killed on their gates. There is no solution to stop the bloodshed except by boycotting.” “God willing,” said another, “we will work to cleanse universities from these filthy groups.”

It was made obvious during Suhad Ali's speech and Jawhary's subsequent remarks that there is no excuse (and has never been) for supporting either the anti-imperialist faction in Iraq, which is dedicated to establishing the men's society over all of Iraq, nor the imperialist faction of the coalition which has effectively functioned as a patron of the worst fundamentalist Shiite militias in the country i.e. the Badr brigades and SCIRI, even tolerating Moqtada Al-Sadr's imposition of Islamic dictatorship in Najaf and other parts of the south, not to mention the coalition's tight relationship with the 'progressive' fundamentalist Al-Sistani (who has declared "that men and women should not mix socially, that music for entertainment is prohibited and that women should veil their hair") and which, by embracing the social forms that bourgeois democracy should in its classical form abolish, has done much to restore and reinforce the twin barbarisms of the tribe and Islam across Iraq. There remains perhaps no alternative to the current impasse than critically supporting left elements in Iraq as well as the diaspora. Perhaps it will fall to the diaspora to organize itself in retaking the cities from which it has been expelled.

Notes on an ongoing workplace struggle (Part 1)

2007-01-26T20:17:00.000+09:00

1. Modern information economy workplaces can be effectively divided between two models. One, the American and European model in which engineers, writers and other employees have separate cubicles, and come together for meetings or collaborative projects. This model maximizes the creativity of the individual worker and the potential for creative intellectual inventorship based on experimentation. Both models are historical forms etched by post-fordist workers, who refused traditional organizations of work not only in terms of the border of overtime and worktime, but also rearranged the spatial organization of the workplace and disaggregated the assembly line into individualized laboratories. Nowadays, in many workplaces, workers confer and communicate mainly via e-mail, with face-to-face consultation becoming an exception.

In Japan, the scene is a bit different in that generally the post-fordist technology economy does not confront an antagonistic technological proletariat, one not only productive of new technologies but also constantly undermining (and therefore advancing) the parameters of their control while re-thinking the traditional organization of the workplace. Instead, Japanese engineers, technical writers and office workers are grouped into large offices with few partitions. The Japanese office resembles a hall arranged in desk islands, which are always horizontally organized and of low height, providing the supervisor(s) an infinite purview of the workers, their activities and tasks. Any computer screen is potentially subject to review at any moment. E-mail has mostly replaced face-to-face interaction, simultaneously bringing with it the potential for 'silent antagonism', unseen affinities between wage workers that develop over certain circuits with the potential for a larger resonance and even an explosion of dissent.

Despite the development of e-mail as a weapon for workers, the situation does not escape the description of 'soft totalitarian control'.

2. The traditional Japanese unions (Sohyo/Rengo) in the post-war period operated with few exceptions as part of the social democratic project and were widely embraced as an intermediary for negotiating the value of the worker's labor as variable capital for capitalists. This is not exceptional in the history of unions. Unions are always interior to the development of capital, actively involved in restraining uncontrolled strike activity which poses a threat to the union's position as mediator between capitalist and worker. The Rengo union's dominance in the late 1960s amidst the collapse of the new left set the stage for Toyota-style management's society-wide reorganization of the workplace from the 1960s on up. Management/worker cooperation and acccord became a fundamental element of the work experience (Rengo worked/works with what is essentially a no-strike policy).

‘Social cooperation’ was (is) an environment characterized by corporative unions (and therefore a splintered working class) and a ‘civil society’ that became more and more impossible to stand outside of. Any critique not made in relation to the well-being of the company (and in many cases the nation) became a non-critique. Any proposal without a counter-proposal was not a proposal. 'Refusal' was an unpopular word. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, despite the increased rate of exploitation and the increasingly integrated nature of production and consumption within society, there were no negative struggles on the level of say, Fiat in Italy, in which the relation between the organization of work, the factory and daily life were confronted.

Given the historical plight of the working class, the average worker's experience with workplace struggle was not widely rooted in the power of withdrawing labor from the labor process (striking, shirking, sabotage), but in:

a) quitting their jobs; permanently withdrawing their individual labor, which can be replaced, but temporarily damages productivity. For instance, t my workplace, five senior employees quit within a space of three months, giving the effective experience of a strike since the upcoming labor shortage will make the training of new employees incredibly difficult and bring productivity down by 60%. Their abandonment of the workplace wound up setting the stage for the current struggle, in which the remaining employees criticize the workplace and work conditions as inadequate and incapable of providing 'staying incentive' for veterans.

b) making requests (but not demands) to the boss in a direct way (usually forced into individual consultations) or in a collective way, almost always with the mediation of a union. Unions are rare among tech workers, who are normally compensated with relatively large salaries in order to balance the enormous amount of overtime that the company demands. However, grievances are not 'aberrant', and seen as an important ingredient of chouwa, the balancing of worker/management interest.

The idea of making 'demands' to a company on the other hand, is terrifying to most workers, who expect that their performance (jitsuryoku) will determine their salary and have been conditioned to accept that the lows of a firm amidst its highs are temporary, or even result from the performance of the firm's employees, the obligation to resolve the crisis lying with them. Critically, if the worker cannot make a demand, she cannot posit herself as different from the firm as labor to capital, and therefore can't make the second step towards revolutionary individuation, the positing of the self as separate from the worker, and at some point a critical confrontation with her position as social labor.

3. In view of points 1 and 2, the modern Japanese workplace and its social setting can be said to combine the barbaric impositions of early capitalist factory organization in the prohibition of cubicles and offices in favor of splaying workstations before the eyes of the supervisor, and mediation-based organization that integrates the worker into the body of the firm. However, the modern tech enterprise is caught in its own contradictions since the efficiency improvements offered by e-mail and network messaging enable the establishment of e-mail links between disgruntled employees in sections otherwise disparate and incommunicado, who may have very different contract scales and conditions, but share a workplace.

There is also a tendency to develop collective think pads, most often message boards in technological (thus intellectual property) workplaces, which ostensibly serve as places for the development of new technologies and ideas, but these places are always at risk of being overwhelmed by their potential use as instruments of discussion and exchange. The workers can subvert and re-work collective means of communication intended for the development and coordination of capital to discuss contradictions and inconsistencies in the workplace, or to convey dissent, even if that is done in vague ways. The supervisors can destroy the forums that they have created, or delete individual postings, but in doing so reveal their repressive role, risking an open confrontation. Every posting therefore has the potential to chip away at the organization of the workplace, having an always-accessible longevity that can be used as a gathering pole for those who are fed up. Some emails go out, some responses come in, a gathering is organized, a group coordinates itself...

4. The nefarious side of the 'timelessness' in intra-workplace digital communication, which replaces the shop room floor as a venue of discussion, is the unfortunate dulling of real-time antagonism in the workplace, which should move from: question, response--> exposure of contradiction-->confrontation-->activity-->potential rupture. Any worker prepared to begin a workplace struggle must be conscious of getting trapped in a struggle in the open, undivided and hierarchical space of the workplace, i.e. the open forum of the supervisor. Premature confrontation in this space risks the passivity of workers who have never considered speaking up, but much worse is the trap of a simmering confrontation that does not come to boil.

5. Once the stage is set for a collective struggle (even if it is partial and uneven), it is vital to argue against the ingrained concept of the 'company as life boat', i.e. that 'selfishness' or 'excessive demands' could bankrupt a company or harm its interests leading to other workers suffering. Any company is part of a wider division of labor that includes parent companies connected via capital investment to the company in question, not to mention factories, distribution, and other connections. Most capitalists who are trusted by banks to manage workers and dispose of capital can take out additional business loans or re-organize the workplace to accommodate worker demands. In the event of bankruptcy due to the price of labor power rising to unprofitable levels, most countries have unemployment laws which mandate payment to layed off workers (in Japan's case, a comparatively high payout in unemployment insurance). Overcoming the pretenses that cover management's constant tendency to impose austerities during crises is the first hurdle in separating the individual self-consideration from the company, the recognition that there have been past social struggles waged to provide the safety net for those in the future, and that this safety net creates the possibiliity of standing radically outside what one is inside.

Next I'll consider how how workers can effectively organize conflict in a way that defies the attempts by supervisors and capitalists to capture it in individualized contract changes or by the assignment of mediation to a trade union (which would paralyze it).

(Parts 5-10 coming next week)

関西公園・Public Blue

2007-01-26T19:35:00.000+09:00

By [AHA]

70 min. 2006
Video Documentary
www.kansaikouen.org
　関西公園ラディカル文集・Kansai Kouen Radical Text Library
www.kansaikouen.org/textlibrary.htm
(English follows)

＊「関西公園～Public Blue～」とは
ドイツ、アメリカ、日本のスタッフの協力で制作されたドキュメンタリーフィルム。
詳細情報はwww.kansaikouen.orgにてアップしてあります。

＊主宰者から一言
私たちは「関西公園」という野宿者の抵抗・コミュニティーについてのドキュメンタリーを制作した。
弾圧、テントの強制撤去といった大阪の状況に反対し、今年（2006年1月30日）の靭公園と大阪城公園の行政代執行を中心に、野宿・支援者たちに自分たちの想いや自己認識・情勢理解を語ってもらった。

また、公園住人である野宿者や寄せ場「釜ヶ崎」で暮らす日雇い労働者、そこで表現する活動者の声を拾いながら、テント小屋や寄せ場を撮影した。カメラはいくつもの映像と位相を織り交ぜながら、「物語」を進行している。「関西公園～Public Blue～」は、近代資本主義という状況下でもっとも過酷に搾取される人たちからの声を聞き取ることで、都市に住む野宿生活者の「経験」がスクリーンを見るひとたちの間で共有され、私たちの前に明確な形を帯びてくる。公園の排除が迫るにつれて公共空間そのものが喪失し、野宿・支援者の想いは記録され、言語化される。

大阪の公園で住む野宿生活者自身が「公園」を再定義し、
「関西公園」と呼びうるコミュニティーの再生が映し出される。

＊上映のおねがい
「関西公園～Public Blue～」の上映会をしませんか？
この映像を通して、大阪における強制排除、資本主義の実態や公共空間の喪失といった問題を考えていきたい方、募集します。もちろん、単にビデオとして楽しむのも大歓迎。上映に協力してくれる方は、主宰者に声をかけてください。
どうぞよろしくおねがいします。

Everywhere in parks and on the river banks of Osaka rivers, one sees blue tents or barracks covered with blue plastic tarps, at times scattered throughout park areas, sometimes lined up in rows, or united to form small communities. The term homelessness only insufficiently describes the situation of these 「nojyukusha」, the campers in the rough. These squatters are the daily inhabitants of public space. But just as Japanese society has traditionally little known nor appreciated public space as a public forum, likewise are squatters and homeless people, who live in these spaces, disrespected.

The video essay Public Blue was produced in collaboration with Nojyukusha (squatters) and supporters in Osaka. Public Blue follows their political action against an impending eviction and sketches impressions of the Japanese understanding of the public and the political. Used now as a tool during the struggle against evictions of tents in Osaka, the documentary also becomes a vehicle of articulation for those who are living on the outside of Japanese society. 関西公園・Public Blue has recently debuted in Japan and Europe.
DVDs and VHS will shortly be available for sale and showing at low prices. Contact kansaikouen@hotmail.com for further information.

Dai (Enough) もう嫌

2006-11-13T22:25:00.000+09:00

November 12th, 2006 by phoebe

From Jewlicious

At the Impact Film Festival

Iris Bahr’s one-woman show, “Dai (enough)” , now playing at the Culture Project in NYC, is rather shocking. After walking around the Village, seeing more hipsters in keffiyehs than ever before, it’s bizarre to see a show whose standpoint–if you can even call this a political standpoint–is that those living in Israel have a right to go on living. In the play’s program, Bahr writes about her lack of political stance, how she has both the “left” impulses of an artist and the imperative of an Israeli who has to defend her country’s right to exist.

The play is also shocking because Bahr’s transition between characters is marked by a “suicide bombing.” The character collapses, the lights go out, and what seems to be a real recording of the sounds during such an event–destruction, crying, frightened yelling in Hebrew–plays in the background. During this, Bahr moves to the next of cafe tables set up on the stage and puts on some combination of hat, jacket, or shirt (as well as voice and accent–characters are convincingly male and female, Russian and Israeli) to signify the next character, who we meet that same moment a mere few minutes prior to that same bombing. Even once you know it’s coming, the “bomb” is extremely powerful. It arrives both out of the blue and at a moment when a character’s just about to do something, meet somebody, say something, and thus completely throws off the audience’s expectation for what might happen next. Suicide bombing is thus presented as something one cannot get used to, something fundamentally anti-human.

Bahr’s play is undeniably political, but it is not a polemic. To suggest that suicide bombing is, you know, a bad thing, is, in the context of stylish neighborhoods of NYC, akin to saying you’re pro-Bush, pro-imperialism, and that you think Dave Matthews Band is the very cutting edge of indie rock.

But while “Dai” does, overall, feel pro-Israeli, the pro-settler character is portrayed as verging on insanity (although when she, alongside her many children, is blown up, one does wonder…), and the American Christian evangelist character reveals the dangers of pro-Israeli Jewish Americans aligning themselves with this group. In other words, this play is definitively pro-Israeli and liberal in the contemporary American sense.

The play begins and ends with a British newscaster who’s been accused of presenting an anti-Israeli picture in her news reports. And so, after “six months” among Arabs, she heads for Israel to get a brief glance of that side. Her first target–Bahr’s second character–is a Latina actress in Israel researching for a film. The script for this film, which the character describes over a cellphone–is tied in with that of the play itself. The seemingly unresolvable cellphone argument the newscaster has with her boyfriend at the beginning and end of the play provides another parallel, suggesting that the clash between Israel and the Arabs is, like the conflict between men and women, permanent and unresolvable.

You will laugh and cry in such quick succession, back and forth, that you will leave the theater feeling both moved and, well, off. Each time the “bomb” happens, and Bahr transitions to a different character, you will find yourself recovering from tears with just enough time to really get into the next character’s world. And these are amusing worlds. The Russian prostitute, Bahr in a glittery, midriff-baring shirt and a blonde wig, and armed with forged documents claiming she’s Jewish, says at one point that if things get too violent, she’ll just go back to Moscow to finish her “PhD in physica.” The middle-aged snob–Bahr in sunglasses, shawl, and cigarettes–whose husband has a limo business in New York, demands that she speak in English, even to Israelis, because it comes “mohl natugahlly,” and contrasts crass Israel with the understanded, classy world of Long Island. The Berlin furniture designer discusses a chair he created, named after an Israeli man who dumped him, which is created to be unstable, and which has, due to its poor design, actually killed some people.

An obvious point of reference is Eytan Fox’s popular film, “Walk on Water.” Like Bahr, Fox was born in New York but moved to Israel as a child. Like “Walk on Water,” “Dai” has, among its characters, a gay German man with Nazi grandparents who’s used as a contrast to the macho Israeli, a generation is all that separates the victim and those with the ability to inflict suffering. However, the demand of “Walk on Water” is that we all just get along. The backdrop of suicide bombings is not enough, in Fox’s world, to justify any sort of retaliation or self-defense. The happy ending is a baby born to an Israeli man and a German woman. We’re all the same, and all that.

Bahr’s play presents things a bit differently. In a Tel Aviv cafe, no two people see things alike. All each character’s story has in common with the others is that the character has plans for later. Later that day, later in life, just generally for the future. Not Israel-specific plans, just plans to go on being human. And then, boom, forget it. That’s the tragedy. Whether you were hoping for a hookup, a dinner with family, a new right-wing government, or a stern talk with your son, if you’re blown up, you can forget about it.

The play suggests, perhaps most importantly, that Israel’s existence is as much under attack from suicide bombing as from Jews’ understandable preference for New York. Young Israelis want to move to New York (I should say, here) to avoid the army; older Israelis want to move here to provide comfortable lives for their children; and–and here’s the part that ought to hit the audience closest to home– secular American Jews ask their children to maintain a Jewish identity, to marry other Jews, yet choose not to live in the country where all of this would have a decent chance of happening.

It’s understandable if we give up on Israel, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Is that my belief or the play’s message? A bit of both.

組合と革命？

2006-10-07T00:35:00.000+09:00

From Libcom...

So there have been several discussions of unions, with a lot of implied points. I wanted to try and state some of this discussion briefly (brief relative to 20 page threads!) and succinctly.

Firstly, I wanted to give six basic attitudes (no doubt caricatured, but the best I can do with a limited space at the moment) towards the unions.

Secondly, I wanted to go over some actual brief generalizations that I am more than happy to back up factually, that I think need to frame a proper discussion.

Lastly, I pose some questions to help generate a more focused discussion.

I thought the Aufheben quote might be a nice way to start, instead of derailing the Aufheben thread:

Quote:

Aufheben wrote:

Kolinko are exasperated by the failure of call-centre workers to act independently of unions and works councils, except on an individual basis (eg tricks to skive off). Kolinko document numerous examples of struggles which are negotiated away by unions and works councils, with negligible gains for the workers. It is possible that a rigid anti-union position has a certain validity in the context of the German corporatist 'social partnership' between the state, employers and unions.

However the critique of the recuperative role of unions has a tendency to become ideological within 'ultra-left' groups; a common characterisation of the role of unions as functionaries of capital is that they act as a 'safety valve' to dissipate the revolutionary energy of an otherwise rebellious class; this conception runs the risk of not understanding the process of struggle. The class has a critique of the unions when it is in a position to have one -- ie. through struggles and positions of relative strength. There is a danger of seeing workers as a dumb passive mass duped by the unions. This is a common contradiction of many 'ultra left' analyses which seek to differentiate a pure, autonomous class from the 'external' institutions of the workers' movment (unions, leftist parties), and in so doing, end up concluding that the class has been duped by the ideology of these external forces.

We would argue that Kolinko's critique of the unions and privileging of 'self-activity', autonomous organizing, and wildcat strikes reflects such an 'ultra-left' ideological position; this position freezes the high points of class struggle, when the balance of forces is such that it is in workers' collective interests to act outside or against the unions, and seeks to preserve them as principles or measures by which it judges the present situation.

In our experience the attitude of workers to unions varies: some are relatively pro-union, others anti-union, some both at the same time or both in different situations, and many are indifferent; yet in concrete situations of disputes, their attitude to the union is more likely to be based upon practical considerations, rather than ideological ones -- their criterion is more likely to be whether something is to be gained by following the union, or alternatively acting outside the union. In contrast the 'ultra-left' critique of the unions doesn't relate to practical situations as they present themselves.

Let me add that contrary to what people see as the ultra-Left position today, as I and George Stapleton pointed out on the Aufheben thread, the original Left Communists did not take the same position towards the unions as today’s ultra-left. Bordiga never supported an “outside and against” the unions stance, and the KAPD did so only in the midst of a revolutionary situation where the unions were viewed as an impediment to the development of the revolutionary process, not as a final word on unions.
However, does this matter?

It seems that there are several approaches to the unions.

1) The unions are workers’ self-defense organizations and the problem is that they are controlled by bureaucrats, and so communists should struggle against the bureaucracy and for “workers’ democracy” or “workers’ control” of the unions. The idea here is often that communists should form fractions in the union and that the unions are “schools of class struggle” and solidarity, though not necessarily revolutionary. One classic statement of this is the NEFAC Position paper on unions, but also by a lot of Leninists and some autonomist types.

2) The unions, at least revolutionary unions of the IWW and CGT(?) anarcho-syndicalist type, are revolutionary organs of workers’ struggle and self-organization. The problem is to build these unions against the corporatist, sectoral, bourgeois unions. These organizations are essential to the overthrow of capital.

3) The unions were workers’ organizations, but have been incorporated into the state in the era of decadence post-1914 or so, and have become an organ of the state and are in fact anti-working class, counter-revolutionary organizations. The basis of the degeneration of the unions is here theorized as a structural change in capital, usually based on Luxemburg and/or Grossman/Mattick. This covers the post-1923 Left communist view a la groups like the ICC, Internationalist Perspective, and Mouvement Communiste and also some councilists.

4) The unions were workers’ organizations, but have been incorporated into the state in the era of imperialism or Fordism or the mass worker, and have become an organ of the state and are in fact now anti-working class organizations. Generally, councils and factory/strike committees are counter-poised to the unions as the really autonomous form of workers’ struggle. The basis of the degeneration is here under-theorized and largely empirical. This covers the classic councilist/ultra-left (and some autonomist) views, such as the Kolinko comments, Solidarity (As We See It, points 3 and 4), echange et mouvements, and the Jamesians, like Martin Glaberman.

5) The unions have always been fundamentally premised on the existence and acceptance of wage labor, and therefore capital, but was the form of organization most common to workers demanding an improvement in their immediate conditions of work (wages, working conditions, hours, even a certain amount of labor process control.) However, historically capital was forced to accept the existence of the unions, despite their impediment to capital’s direct control over the labor process, the full atomization of labor, true labor market and wage fluidity, fears that the unions were really communist, etc. The unions traded material improvements for a section of the class in return for aiding in the establishment of social peace (although at a price of course), and institutionalizing differences by industry, trade, skilled and unskilled, etc., each union looking after “it’s own”, also known as corporatism or sectoralism. The unions, in seeking to secure better working conditions, wages, etc. tend to accept legalism (at least via contracts) and tend to become incorporated into the state via state recognition and labor laws, making them even more likely to enforce the conditions that protect their institutional existence and to regard capital’s prerogatives as their own. As such, the unions must become an impediment to communist revolution (the abolition of the capital-labor relation), but not necessarily to struggles for improvement of the lot of workers within the limits of this relation. The unions therefore are not so much anti-worker as anti-communist, summed up in the demand for a fair wage rather than the abolition of wage labor. The general nature of the unions is fundamentally continuous throughout the history of capital (there is no degeneration from a heroic period, nor is there any future heroic period.) “The bureaucracy” is a non-issue, as is “union democracy”. “Revolutionary unions” are a contradiction in terms. However, the communist critique of the internal limits of the unions requires grasping the contradictory activity of the unions in the concrete, to make clear not that unions must ultimately be counter-revolutionary (as banal as the idea that Man creates God), but why these organizations act this way under these conditions to help clarify and fortify our fellow workers, whether they are strong enough to go beyond the unions or not; whether their struggle happens within the unions or outside of them. This is essentially my view, and how I more or less understand Aufheben’s point (and certainly what I have tried to enunciate from my first post on unions, to my critique of NEFAC’s workplace paper to the discussion over communists as stewards in the unions.)

6) All class struggle is fundamentally within capital, and therefore is always essentially trade unionist. Participating in class struggle is implicitly engaging in the trade unionist struggle and this is unavoidable. Critiquing the unions from a class struggle perspective is irrelevant, a kind of moralism that fails to recognize that it shares the same ground. There is no reason to not participate in the unions in principle, only for practical reasons. The problem is how to move from class struggle to communisation, the abolition of class struggle. The unions are no more an impediment than the class struggle as a whole. This view, unique as far as I know, is that of Theorie Communiste and groups and individuals influenced by their view.

Some food for thought to add to this (all examples based on the U.S. unless otherwise specified):

• The AFL-CIO played a key role in managing labor, acting as a second management and intermediary in the labor market and generally reinforced intra-class divisions, like race, gender, skilled/unskilled, etc. in the post-WWII period. Then again, this was also true of the AFL from the 1890’s forward. For example, the CIO worked with the Ku Klux Klan after WWII to break the Communist Party-led, highly integrated Southern unions, which is merely one of the most blatant examples.

• The AFL-CIO was involved in drafting legislation and supporting the U.S. abroad through nationalist, anti-worker policies and collaboration with the CIA and U.S. foreign policy agencies. Then again, so was the AFL from the 1890’s forward (drafting anti-Chinese legislation, undermining the Mexican revolution from 1910-18, etc.)

• The CIO rarely gained any actual wage raises in the 1930’s. Most often, such as at GM and Ford and Chrysler, struggles led by the most radical of the CIO unions, the United Auto Workers, no material gains were made other than recognition of the unions and collective bargaining.

• Wage and conditions improvements post 1941 were largely gained through wage-productivity agreements, where in return for increased wage and benefits, the unions guaranteed increases in productivity and social peace in the workplace. Most post-WWII militant workplace struggles were wildcats, which were as much against the unions as against the company.

• Unions have made wages and benefits less susceptible to market fluctuations, improving the security of the workers covered by the unions. This has included defensive strikes designed to impede the company from imposing cutbacks. This remained true through the 1970’s, excepting that the AFL and CIO, prior their unification in 1952, imposed wage freezes, no-strike contracts, etc. during WWII.

• Unions have provided a certain amount of legal and material protection against companies acting arbitrarily and also provide a certain amount of protection when organizing within the workplace, both through a collective environment of solidarity and through formal impediments to arbitrary activity, i.e. enforcement of contractual relations.

• Where there are no unions or few unions, wages, benefits and working conditions are usually worse.

• In politically radicalizing conditions and within radical organizations, the unions usually make up the right-wing of the movement and its organizations (see European Social Democracy, for example, by the 1890’s and certainly through today), though one could argue that this is less clear with European syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. That would no doubt require a lengthy discussion of Dutch, German, French and Spanish syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism.

• Many unions have heavy stock investments, including in the corporations and industries where they are organized. The UAW bragged about just this frequently in the 1970’s and 80’s, but then again Samuel Gompers lost his diamond ring playing baseball with captains of industry in the early 1900’s.

• The unions are not beyond breaking with legalism in order to stay at the head of, control and re-direct radicalizing social struggles. One of the more famous examples was John L. Lewis’ retort to his use of communists as CIO organizers: Who gets the bird, the dog or the hunter? This encapsulates with a remarkable clarity the implicit consciousness of radical trade unionism. Another interesting example was Solidarnosc in Poland, which for all of the radicalism in and around it against the Stalinist regime, became the effective governing party under “democratic”, free market Poland. Or COSATU, which since the end of apartheid in South Africa, has acted often as the grassroots workplace wing of the now-ruling ANC.

* Unions do not always hold the workers back. Sometimes unions enable radicalism that otherwise might be difficult. A multitude of examples can be raised for this as well, esp at the level of local struggles within a particular workplace.

Some questions:
• How much have the unions functioned to gain democratic incorporation of the working class into capital?

• The craft unions corresponded most closely to the craft/skilled worker-oriented labor process; industrial unions corresponded most closely to the industrial-mass worker-oriented labor process. Do either of these any long correspond to the labor processes that seem to be developing today?

• Are syndicalism, councilism and industrial unionism, as forms of organization and politics, relics of the old mass worker and the Fordist structure of industry? This would not necessarily mean that there are no such types of industries, any more than craft labor has disappeared, but it no longer seems to be the dominant form of labor process.

• Are the COBAS and other such unions the “new unionism” or will there be no “new unionism”?

• What does workers’ defending their day-to-day conditions by whatever means available have to do with communists? That is, do we have means or methods to prescribe to those struggles?

• What is the relationship between the practical critique of the unions by the workers (break with the unions in 1917-23; wildcats in the 1960’s and 70’s; etc.) and the critique of the unions as organizations whose limits reside fully on this side of capital? This is clearly the sorest spot because it involves figuring out how one relates, if at all, to the unions in practice. To put it another way, while workers may develop a practical critique of the unions (one I would argue they must develop in a process of radicalization), while that practical critique and the communist critique reside fairly comfortably in a revolutionary situation or era, what is the proper attitude and practice of communists in a period when the workers are on the defensive or, as today, quite atomized?

WHEN THE GRASS IS CUT THE SNAKES WILL SHOW

2006-07-28T21:14:00.000+09:00

THE STORY SO FAR

Over these past three weeks the cold front on the southern Lebanese border has flared up again, shaking the Lebanese earth with what seems, in the obvious analysis, to be a surreal replay of the Lebanese civil war. As the munitions fly over the borders and the IDF heads deeper and deeper into Lebanese territory, it is worth taking a closer look at the situation as well as its critics.

If we can mark a 'starting point' in what is a continuous and uninterrupted process, the two recent summits between Israel, America and Hezbollah, Iran shed some light on what's happening. When Olmert and Bush met in Washington, the post-Iraqi collapse phase of American foreign policy had to be worked out with Olmert's post-Sharon convergence plan. When Hizbullah and the Iranian revolutionary guards met this April, their strategy revolved much more around strengthening the rejectionist wing of Palestinian politics, reviving Hezbollah's fortunes in Lebanon and therefore Iranian influence in the country. Despite this coordination however, the volume and ferocity of the Israeli response took Hizbullah and its regional patrons by surprise. What could the IDF's invasion of Lebanon mean? And why now?

Iraq begins to answer the question. Iraq has collapsed, not merely in the American promise for a bourgeois democracy, which was dead by the point when the CPA wouldn't answer Kanan Makiya's calls, but in unrelenting, savage attacks on basic tenets of human civilization. What became the Iraqi civil war developed out of the dissolution of the national capitalist bloc, which the Ba'ath government had held together. Once that framework was smashed by the American armed forces, who also could not control the consequences, the Iraqi elite found themselves shopping for patrons outside the Coalition Provisional Authority. This process of fracturization happened for several reasons. America and its allies had introduced austerities, such as the non-payment of soldiers, resulting in an unsatisfied working class which initially caused riots and then joined sectarian militias which promised some measure of collective defense. Further, America's coalition could not preserve security on Iraqi oil lines, adding constant trauma to the circulatory system of an economy in collapse. Finally, local capitalists and lawmakers who were willing to cooperate with the CPA were targeted and often killed. The militias grew stronger, and the breakdown of market order tore the Iraqi ruling class apart.

The initial resistance movements that exploded against the British and the Americans, such as the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Al Sadr in the south, were mainly Shi'a. At the same time that other militias were vying for power, the Shi'a ruling class sought to secure its own fortunes by enrolling Shiite workers and poor in its fight for shares of the state. Their strategy worked. Sadr's Mahdi Army was given access to power after the Americans fought them to a standstill in Najaf in summer 2004, although the American media would report differently. Together with the Badr brigades who were already powerful in the Iraqi government thanks to the influence of SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) in the Iraqi exile community, the Iraqi state in its initial stages became a heavily sectarian body, and remained so. Talabani's government swung to the Kurdish/Shi'a axis in efforts to control Iraqi 'resistance' groups (largely Sunni and nationalist) who fought to regain influence in the oil ministry, as well as to extend their influence over key territories such as the "triangle of death" south of Baghdad.

Iran became an obvious patron of the Mahdi Army, though at a careful distance. Syria and Saudi Arabia focused on factional and inter-communal negotiations to prop up the Iraqi state against the threat of dissolution. Once the Imam Ali al-Hadi shiite shrine in Samara had been bombed, the open status of civil war between sectarian factions (masked clan and capitalist factions), was made obvious. For Saudi Arabia the threat of a Shi'a insurgency on its own soil was and is very real. Shiites live as second-class citizens in the kingdom, and the Shi'a belt stretching from Tehran to Basra is a newly insurgent religious and economic power (albeit fractured). Accordingly, as the Saudis made every effort to cooperate in the 'stabilization of Iraq', they looked the other way as Salafis crossed their borders to join the anti-Shiite death squads of the increasingly boiling civil war. Although its elites are reliant on America to restrain these pressures, the Saudis have significant influence on American military strategy in the region, as they are a key part of it. The tensions now erupting between Sunnis and Shiites throughout Iraq are discursive with the larger tensions between the regional powers Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. This ridiculous sectarian divide, which had never existed in such a virulent form, became a pivot for the inter-imperialist conflict around Iraq, and one which America had no choice but to exploit in order to keep the failed Iraqi state from collapsing. America is now desperate to maintain even a military presence in Baghdad, as the city increasingly divides into territories administered by sectarian gangs and death squads.

The Iran and Saudi Arabia divide explains why the Arab League voted to support the government of Lebanon in the current melee, and not Hezbollah, the Shiite army which has proven its credentials as an Islamist guerilla organization after helping drive the IDF out of Lebanon in 2000, and holds (or held) the most powerful stockpile of weapons within Lebanon's borders. Bleeding the Iraqi working class in sectarian carnage had produced divisions too deep to allow the spotlight to fall on the Shiite Hezbollah, who were now described as 'adventurists'.

The new Lebanon "adventure" began in Gaza. 3,000 rockets had previously been launched into southern Israeli towns such as Sderot and Ashkelon in less than a year after Israel's disengagement from the strip. Within days of the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza, synagogues left behind, and settler businesses set aside for new Palestinian owners were burned to the ground as the strip became sovereign Palestinian territory. At the same time, the same rocket cells who had long taken aim at Gush Katif and other Israel settlements took new positions, much more to the north. Rocket barrages became continuous, most originating from Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza. The attacks were organized in mobile launching squads staffed mainly by Islamic Jihad, and less often, Hamas militants. Sderot bore the brunt of the assault. Its residents were given a premonatory glimpse of the strategic priorities of Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions in the current war. Islamic Jihad could offer no greater propaganda to its patrons and supporters than attacking the Israelis from land they'd just abandoned. The rocket barrages made the nationalist fantasy of eradicating the Israelis and their nation more alive than any media could possibly achieve. Such an easy resentment allows the Jihad's anti-semitic populism to be perpetuated. On the level of political 'resistance', the rockets were justified with denunciations of the occupation, but Islamic Jihad's aim was (and is) to terrorize Sderot and the southern Kibbutzes by creating paranoia and constant dread.

To defend themselves from the rockets, Sderot and other southern Israeli cities implemented a Red Dawn early warning missile alert system to provide residents a 20 second advanced warning of rocket attacks. But the ranges grew longer. In March, Palestinian factions cooperating with Hezbollah managed to fire several long-range Katyusha missiles into Israel, reaching as far as Ashkelon.

The IDF carried out assasinations on rocket manufacturers and their workshops, as well as counter-attacks against mobile rocket cells, at times with overwhelming and indiscriminate force. Israeli counter-attacks against the Qassam cells led to the deaths of seven people on a beach in north Gaza near Beit Lahiya on June 9, which provided enough ammunition for Hamas to temporarily scuttle the prisoner document initiative led by Abbas and a group of Palestinian prisoners. This initiative would have meant de-facto recognition of Israel in its 1967 borders by all signatories. But to bury this document, Hamas needed a spectacular media moment, and took it in the abduction of corporal Gilad Shalit, who, Hamas proposed, would be exchanged for mainly female Palestinian prisoners. A different kind of prisoner's document.

By now, pressure by Israelis living in Sderot to end the Qassam assault had fallen on Amir Peretz, the new Labor defense minister. The IDF surrounded the northern border of the Gaza strip and began an incursion into the same land it had withdrawn from less than a year ago. Its mandate included not only retrieving Shalit, but also attacking munitions factories and the organization of rocket barrages. As they fought, the IDF pushed as south as Gaza city, destroying bridges and heavily damaging the Gaza power plant, under the pretense of retrieving Shalit. More than 90 civilians were killed in the offensive which failed to retrieve the prisoner and exercised an obvious collective punishment on the Gazan population. It was at this moment when Hezbollah saw an opportunity to open up a second front against Israel in the north, which would at the very least revive its declining fortunes in the post-withdrawal era and probably retrieve some Hizbollah prisoners, while again, empowering the Palestinian right. Guerillas strafed northern Israeli villages with rocket fire, injuring eight people as a ruse, which was used to raid a northern IDF position, killing an IDF soldier and kidnapping two.

Joschka Fischer, the former foreign minister of Germany (quite infamous in his own capacity) comments on Hezbollah's aims with the attack:

Conflict was sought for three reasons: first to ease pressure on Hamas from within the Palestinian community to recognize Israel; second to undermine democratization in Lebanon, which was marginalizing Syria; and third to lift attention from the emerging dispute over the Iranian nuclear program and demonstrate to the West the "tools" at its disposal in the case of a conflict.

Within hours of the abduction of the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers from the northern border, IDF tanks were making their way across the border to attack Hezbollah positions.

"[A] force of tanks and armored personnel carriers was immediately sent into Lebanon in hot pursuit. It was during this pursuit, at about 11:00 A.M. . . . [a] Merkava tank drove over a powerful bomb, containing an estimated 200 to 300 kilograms (440–660 Lb) of explosives, about 70 meters (230 ft) north of the border fence. The tank was almost completely destroyed, and all four crew members were killed instantly. Over the next several hours, IDF soldiers waged a fierce fight against Hezbollah gunmen . . . During the course of this battle, at about 3:00 P.M., another soldier was killed and two were lightly wounded."

(Map of Lebanon assault, click to enlarge)
In Gaza as Qassams rained down upon Sderot and other southern Israeli cities, Israeli Air Force jets strafed Beirut airport, destroying its main runway. Beirut was comprehensively bombed over several days concentrating on several suburbs south of the main city. Israel also effected a naval embargo on the country, attacked fuel supplies and bombed the Beirut/Damascus highway. Within days the IDF assault caused 400 Lebanese casualties and made over 500,000 people refugees. By now the dead stand at around 900, with apparently 2 billion dollars worth of damage to Lebanese infrastructure. The IDF's offensives seemed to be overwhelmingly destructive, with one obvious aim, the establishment of a buffer zone in south Lebanon entailing effective command over southern Lebanese villages (the same ones the IDF had occupied before they retreated from Lebanon) and the retaliatory levelling of a good deal of infrastructure, which together with the destruction wrought in the southern Beirut suburbs and elsewhere points perhaps to a second aim. Rebuilding funds for Lebanon have already been pledged on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel and the United States. It seems that the initial wave of destruction was wrought on behalf of friendly capital, not necessarily for a net profit, but for a share in the restructuring of the Lebanese state, and later, in a possible disarmament of Hezbollah. The Israeli government's rejection of a UN role in a future international force and Olmert's open welcome for (of all countries) Germany to police South Lebanon today seems to confirm this. Clearly then, the West and Syria and Iran want Lebanon as a bulwark in the increasingly bloody inter-imperialist competition. In a darker scenario, the country could be transformed into a battlefield between warring powers.

Hezbollah hit back hard at Israel after the initial Lebanon assault, with hundreds of rocket attacks carried out against civilian targets in the north. 1,000,000 Israelis evacuated to bomb shelters in both the north and south. The first major Israeli casualties of the war were felt when Hezbollah managed to hit Haifa with rockets. 9 Israelis were killed at a train station. Nasrallah would apologize shortly after for causing any injury to any Arabs living in the city. The rocket attacks and casualties continue.

(Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas rocket ranges into Israel)

In terms of its mandate, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has not born much fruit. After Olmert claimed that Hezbollah's missile capacities in the south had been effectively knocked out, a record 210 rockets hit Israeli northern communities. Only the taking of the south Lebanese village of Tyre has had the effect this week of finally ending the rocket threat to Haifa (late edit: maybe not). An estimated 400 Hezbollah troops have been killed, while attempts to disrupt the broadcasts of the anti-semitic propaganda network Al-Manar have been mostly ineffectual for the time being.

Nasrallah and his army have different aims. While consolidating power in Lebanon is by now a priority, the rocket attacks on northern Israel are his only hope of stopping the Israeli population's support for the invasion, while also giving his troops the honor of striking at the "Zionists" directly. On July 16, Nasrallah gave a by-now infamous speech which Juan Cole translated from the Arabic and comments as follows:

I watched in horror as this maniacal speech unfolded in which Nasrallah actually threatened the Israelis with releasing chemical gas from local factories on civilians in Haifa. Despite fighting them for all those years, he clearly does not understand the Israelis' psyche or the trauma of the Holocaust. A threat like that. The Israelis don't like being caught in a quagmire any more than the next person, which is why Nasrallah could get them to leave southern Lebanon. But his victory appears to have given him megalomania, and he has now gone too far.

Hizbullah's attacks on Israeli civilians are war crimes. The killing of the civilians in Haifa at the train station was a war crime. And threatening to release chemicals from factories on civilian populations is probably a war crime in itself, much less the doing of it.

Obviously, I do not accept that Hizbullah's actions justify the wholesale indiscriminate destruction and slaughter in which the Israelis have been engaged against the Lebanese in general. But they do have every right to defend themselves against Nasrallah and his mad bombers.

Within that defense, the theme of collective punishment has obviously been important to both sides. On the IDF assault on Lebanon Israeli Colonel Gal Luft commented:

"Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land."

An Israeli Air Force officer also stated:

"Army chief of staff Dan Halutz has given the order to the air force to destroy 10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district (of Beirut) in response to every rocket fired on Haifa."

A fever dream of the 1980s. But this time the IDF has no explicit allies, no Maronites waiting in the wings. At the outset, the fantasy held that collective punishment would 'teach them', when in fact now the opposite has proven true, that the resentment that was at a lull has grown, and that Siniora and his government look more and more likely to be overwhelmed by Hezbollah, Syria, Iran or all three.

And then we have Nasrallah and his anti-semitic army, which as soon as the invasion was in swing, were practicing their own forms of collective punishment, not only in Israel, which would conform with their mandate, but in south Lebanon:

Residents who have recently escaped from Mari tell of a dramatic, desperate situation in the village. The Druse residents, who have no affinity at all for Hizbullah, resisted Hizbullah's attempts to enter the village. The IAF apparently and unwittingly assisted in their resistance by bombing the roads leading into the village, cutting off the militia's ability to enter the town, at least temporarily. Hizbullah responded by cutting off the town's electricity and water supply, essentially laying seige to a town on its own side of the border, hoping that its residents would pack up and leave. Many of them have done so. My sources say that Hizbullah has been desperate to enter the village but has as of yet been unable to do so in large numbers. Residents also describe a growing humanitarian crisis in the village due to the lack of fresh water.
...
Hizbullah attempted to enter Mari not to defend it from attackers, but so they could fire rockets from the village toward Israel. Hizbullah's intention was to bring Israeli reprisals on the town, ostensibly to destroy or damage it significantly, and to cause greater civilian suffering. Hizbullah's MO and tactics are well-known in the south. However, Druse typically defend their own villages, and in the case of Mari (a place I have been to several times, many of whose residents I know personally), the residents have desperately tried to keep Hizbullah fighters out of their area.

When Hezbollah found 18 people they suspected of being spies, they were shot on the spot.

Hezbollah were not isolated for long. As they coped with the strikes against their offices in Beirut and southern Lebanon, allies in their struggle against Israel prepared themselves for intervention abroad. Who would come to help Hezbollah? Iraq had the answer. Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army sent 1500 troops to fight the IDF, in a total embarassment of American power. Sadr's moves make coherent a rising Shiite belt that now attempts to assert itself from Beirut to Tehran to Basra. Syria also seems to be making concessions to this new power:

"Obviously Iran and Syria have strengthened their relations over the last nine months," says Andrew Tabler, Damascus-based researcher and a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs. "And their ideological correspondence has come along with suitable iconography. So, before the Syria-Iran defense pact was about to be signed in mid-June, we started seeing these posters with Bashar, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad. You used to have to go to the Bekaa Valley or the south suburbs of Beirut to see posters of Iranian leaders. Now we get them in the middle of an Arab capital.

Thus the Iranians have started to invest heavily in what some are calling the Shiitization of Syria, a country with a roughly 70 percent Sunni majority. "There are reports of entire villages becoming Shia," says Tabler. "And we know for sure that they're fixing up Shia shrines and building Shia mosques, even in majority Sunni towns."

Other Iraqi elements may join the Mahdi Army and already another 60 Iranian volunteers have left for the Lebanon front. This is an international of sorts, but based on two false premises: negatively, in the assault on Israel, and positively, for the 'defense' of the Shi'a community. This 'defense' is in fact a desperate offense, to build a new capitalist unity along the Shi'a belt, so that the Iran-allied ruling classes of the middle East can maintain control over their working classes as the Iraqi economy discoheres and the Iranian military prepares for possible regional war.

THE OPPOSITION

Curiously, as the IDF's aircraft reached every corner of Lebanon, an exodus ensued.

The Danes got a test run in crisis management earlier this year when newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests against Danish embassies in Muslim countries.

One of the Danish Muslims who spearheaded the rallies against the prophet drawings, Lebanese-born Ahmad Akkari, was among those evacuated from Beirut on Thursday.

"My impression is that the transportation has been safe and that no one has been suffering," Akkari told Denmark's TV2 channel as he boarded a Greek ferry chartered by Denmark.

Next, Omar Bakri, founder of al-Muhajiroun, tried to escape the Jihad that he'd called for, pleading for his 'right to safety'. The same man who printed posters denying Europe's holocaust had called for war to extermination against Israel with statements like:

"We are talking about a cancer in the heart of the Muslim world and that is Israel. It must be eradicated and removed."

For Bakri, it seems that others would have to perform the surgery. The warmongers of European Islamic fundamentalism stood quite revealed. But who would reveal the 'real' warmongers?

The left took on this role. Protests against the offensive developed in countries all over the world, with much more credibility than Bakri or Akkari. On July 22, demonstrations were held in

"Beirut, Barcelona, Basra, Chicago, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Geneva, London, Manchester, Mexico City, Montreal, Newcastle, New York, Paris, Rome, Sheffield, Stockholm, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Warsaw,"

according to the Stop the War Coalition. More are planned as the conflict continues. Many demonstrations have been spontaneous and for the moment most come out of an elementary sympathy for the Lebanese who cannot escape the bombardments, along with an outrage at the IDF which has deliberately used collective punishment in its war aims. People are generally terrified at the prospect of a conflict any more destructive than what we have already witnessed.

Unsurprisingly, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and Islamist organizations, themselves part of the lineage of the anti-war movement and the anti-globalization movement, are most often the organizing nuclei of these demonstrations.

This is not so neutral. These organizations actively intervene to mediate outrage about the war in particular directions. Broadly they lead a coalition of non-critiques under a 'united front' which conveniently avoids any internal problematics that might arise with for instance, socialists allying themselves with Islamic fundamentalists. It is no surprise that with these compromises made, they've convinced themselves to have identified 'the culprits'. See for instance, this
London pro-Hezbollah march organized by the Socialist Worker Party's RESPECT coalition (no endorsement of the absurd source). Who else could the culprit be but Israel, the immediate target for these easy critiques and the one state in the middle east with virtually no oil and therefore minimal economic power. 1973's oil crisis proved this. Much of Israel's international diplomatic leverage evaporated in weeks as the raw weight of oil, on which every major world economy runs, allowed the Arab ruling classes to re-position themselves against the Jewish minority in their midst. Most states were as 'realist' then as they are now; the same holds for, apparently, the 'peace' movement.

On the internet there has been a rapid increase in average people taking up the rhetoric of crass anti-Zionism, conspiracy theories about the events of 9/11 and slowly and steadily, a denial of the Shoa. Nothing else seems to offer a quicker way out of the crisis for the disinclined. If the Iraq war was fought on false premises and erupted into a Rwanda, then every constituent motivation for its launch must be a lie. Similarly, if the IDF commits massacres in Beirut, then massacres in Israel should not be prevented. This is the inverting principle of the spectacle, which made paranoid cinema like"the Matrix" into mass events. Men and women trained to interpret and participate in spectacular history can now imagine themselves to be stripped of all illusions. The oppression of Iraqis by the Ba'ath party, which was once as upsetting as a darkly realized cut scene, is revealed as a distraction from the nefarious affairs of the hidden 'villain'. Plot discussions are held. The people want a surprise ending. By disabling their critical reasoning in refusing to analyze the economic system within which the massacres take place, they make the shortened critique of capital's profound crisis inevitable. If it is not the Arabs who deserve the blame than it must be the Jews.

(The Independent shows exactly what the peace movement stands for.)

Abstract negation finds itself a path of least resistance. Israel is the purloined state, birthed by a people without a home who could never have one. Adorno mentioned during his breakdown of classic European anti-semitism that, in direct contradiction to the anti-semetic paranoia that the world is run by Jews (which can be disproven by the mere existence of Haaretz), that the Jews could be criticized by anyone because although they were denied higher eschelons of power, they were at the same time suspended above the lowest professions by their historical economic role as merchants. If the roles are different now, the content of the paranoia has not changed much. Anti-semitism is more than the average pursuit of a scapegoat. It is always a populist phenomenon fueled by people denied their own power who imagine it returned to them in the destruction of something real. What better way to do this than by attacking those with no 'natural' place in the integrated landscape of capitalism. 2006 shows how little things have changed from 1936. The wolves in their cubicles howl for the 'guilty one'. Israel and it alone deserves to be abandoned, if not proactively 'wiped off the map'. Why, after all, protect people that don't contribute to the 'national interest'? (Let's deport the illegals too)

(The "Islamic Thinkers' Society" in New York City)

As long as a more radical critique, and attack, on the mediations of capitalism and the state is refused by its supposed gravediggers, the surface-level critique on offer from the anti-imperialist left will continue to surge in popularity, i.e. that the small refuge created for holocaust survivors and their descendants shoulders the blame for the genocidal armies that line up against it.

Strictly in this sense and apart from the class tensions the bourgeoisie has to manage in its push to war, the population of Israel face their own 'end of history', a lonely struggle against the sealing consensus around them, one co-signed by Ahmadinejad, Galloway, Mahler, Assad, Nasrallah, and other inversions of the intellectual, who have announced what 'everyone agrees on': that humanity is united not by universal history, but instead by a false negation of bourgeois democracy, which instrumentalizes ethnic cleansing for the sake of 'payback' .

Lebanon in the meantime is transformed into an entrenchment between the American and Iranian poles of capital. The IDF offensive, and its use of high-volume weapons in civilian population centers has made massacres like Qana inevitable. If things do not change, the Lebanese and Israeli populations will suffer much in the bloody competition of foreign powers.

After the bodies of children were cleared from the rubble of Qana, it was evident that the Israeli government had already made the worst move of the entire war. Just the previous day, Hezbollah had agreed to a seven-point peace plan proposed by Lebanese PM Siniora which would have deployed the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon. Now this is gone. Instead, after Qana, Siniora thanked Hezbollah for its brave resistance and re-legitimized Sayyid Nasrallah for Lebanese politics. This coup will only prolong the carnage and drive Lebanon north of the Letani river more and more into the hands of Syria (which may invade) and Iran.

Ultimately the Sunni/Shi'a split that the American side is trying to exacerbate may not prove effective, as we can see in the rejections of a fatwa condemning Hezbollah by the mainly Sunni Islamic Brotherhood. The only wildcard remaining is an IDF assault on Hezbollah's stronghold in the Bekaa valley, but given 'the story so far', it seems unlikely that this will damage Hezbollah sufficiently to end the war, not to mention the potential consequences of such an offensive in terms of civilian life and a wider conflict. Haaretz has pointed out that less than 400 Hezbollah men have been killed so far in the fighting , and relations between Beirut and Israel will most likely only get worse from here. Truly, the Israeli anti-war movement has a point when they label the offensive an 'American war' that has very little to do with the lives of Israelis.

And so we return to Kanan Makiya, whose reflections on Lebanon's two decades of war prove haunting.

"The Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975 between the so-called 'progressive' and 'reactionary' forces. That's how we tended to view it. There were those who were on the side of the class struggle and those who were against. But that form of classification was really at odds with the way the war was unfolding. Sectarian and communitarian tensions were at work in the so-called 'left' front of forces, which was really nationalist and radical-nationalist and sometimes capable of the same sorts of atrocities as the Christian forces, or 'reactionary' forces as we insisted on calling them."

The movement for a better world, communism, must do better than the ugly historical flashback that the ruling classes of the West and the Mid-East have planned for Lebanon. Illusions regarding the progressive character of either American or Iranian capital have to be dispelled at once. Communist analysis starts from the observation that the carnage developing in the mid-East today has its origin in the international economy and its pre-requisite: the surrender of the individual to a process that stands above her. In criticizing the alienation of this essential power, we too have the opportunity to seize history by the scruff of the neck.

The war will develop even if both sides reach a cease-fire, and entrenchment is to be expected. So are more massacres. These could be in Lebanon, Israel, or elsewhere as we can expect widespread and spectacular attacks upon Jewish targets and Jewish people.

In the west, as the war clouds mount and the working class remains silent, the destruction of Lebanon continues apace, while worried money counters watch their stock prices and re-assess the 'strategic viability' of Israel; for this reality the Israelis take every opportunity before it becomes impossible to strike against the rocket launchers that will be used against them tomorrow. Similarly, here and there idiot machines wonder 'what the world would be like without Israel', the 'obstacle' to peace, the 'reason' the whole world is at war, while they punch the time cards of the commodity economy, an economy which demands the same enormous energy output that ruling classes and powerful families of the middle east compete hand over fist to extract and supply every day. A process that cannot exist without the establishment of a 'common enemy' to distract the exploited, just as the scum of the west cannot keep their torture prisons and Iraqi dictatorship running without their own 'common enemy'. It is in this environment where the communist movement must declare its absolute opposition to the peace movement which develops everywhere, and instead its support for the class war which develops everywhere.

(He too wanted peace)

イスラム原理主義の独裁に衝突

2006-03-07T21:08:00.000+09:00

With a few alterations...

Posted supportively but also critically (Democracy? Human rights?):

Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

Presentations:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from somilian origin, is member of Dutch parliement, member of the liberal party VVD. Writter of the film Submission which caused the assasination of Theo Van Gogh by an islamist in november 2004, she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq
Chahla Chafiq, writer from iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She’s the author of "Le nouvel homme islamiste , la prison politique en Iran " (2002). She also wrote novels such as "Chemins et brouillard" (2005).

Caroline Fourest
Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review who defend liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on « laicité » and fanatism : Tirs Croisés : la laïcité à l’épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq : discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She receieved the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy
French philosoph, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century « ism » (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L’Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji
Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith" (en francais: "Musulmane Mais Libre"). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Née en Ouganda, elle a fui ce pays avec sa famille musulmane d’origine indienne à l’âge de quatre ans et vit maintenant au Canada, où ses émissions et ses livres connaissent un énorme succès.

Mehdi Mozaffari
Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on islam and islamism such as : Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Glaobalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie
Writer, TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran’s International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society’s Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen
Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called « Destroy Taslima » and to be persecuted as « apostate »

Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany’s Author of the Year Award, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Center. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val
Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing french newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the danish citizens targeted by islamists).

Ibn Warraq
Ibn Warraq , author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim ; Leaving Islam : Apostates Speak Out ; and The Origins of the Koran , is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir
Born in Lebanon, christian, Antoine Sfeir choosed french nationality to live in an universalist and « laïc » (real secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l’Orient and has published several reference books on islamism such as Les réseaux d’Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam : la République face au communautarisme (2005).

International Crisis Group report on the Iraqi Insurgency (国際危機グループのイラクレジスタンスを題した報告）

2006-02-17T00:33:00.000+09:00

The International Crisis Group has released its new report: "In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency"

"The U.S. and its allies seem to know little about the enemies they are fighting in Iraq, despite volumes of information on insurgent web sites, chat rooms, magazines and videos, which are a large part of their communication with each other and their constituents. Analysis of this undervalued communication suggests armed insurgency groups are less divided between nationalists and foreign jihadis than commonly reported, and are increasingly coordinated, confident and information-savvy. The better the U.S. understands their message and why it resonates, the better it will understand how to win hearts and minds. Coalition forces should take what the opposition says seriously, rather than dismiss it as propaganda, and adjust political strategy accordingly."

Essential reading since it gives a rare detailed look at resistance groups on the ground, while keeping in mind the standpoint of their position (American imperialism).

On the dictatorship of Islam - Mahmood Ketabchi (風刺漫画のこせこせ)

2006-02-15T20:40:00.000+09:00

(Note: I post this piece quite late on the subject of the massive wave of reaction following the publication of satirical cartoons of the 'prophet' Mohammed. No need to explain my absolute disdain for the totalitarians [Hizb Ut-Tahrir] who threw a frothing screamfest in favor of the men's society. Obviously I do not agree with everything Ms. Ketabchi says in this article, I think for instance that to believe in 'the freedom of the press' is to believe wholly in the separations of the society of the spectacle, but I post it out of solidarity, for all those secular and communist Arabs who have been murdered by the armies and police squads of (or occupying) the mid-East. Let us remember in this time of pure reaction the 800 bus workers arrested in Tehran by the dictators of 'the holy prophet'. )

Written by Mahmood Ketabchi, an exiled comrade of the Worker Communist Party of Iran in active in support work for workers' and women's movements in Iran and Iraq. Emphasis added.

Defend Freedom of Press—and the Right to Blasphemy

by Mahmood Ketabchi
February 9, 2006

The publication of cartoons of Muhammad by several European newspapers has given the political Islamists an opportunity to launch a brutal international assault against freedom of press and the right to blasphemy. Islamist demonstrators attacked and burned a few European embassies, launched sectarian attacks on people from other religions, and threatened the lives of European citizens. In the streets of London, they called for murder and beheading of the cartoonists and anyone who insults Islam and threatened a special 9/11 massacre for Europeans. It went so far that a demonstrator in front of the Danish Embassy in London wore suicide bomber's gear. The US and European governments declared their regrets over the cartoons and apologized to the Islamists. Even the Pope, representing the Catholic establishment, pitched in his two cents condemning the cartoon, maybe out of fear that someone might draw caricatures of the church's collusion with pedophilic Catholic priests raping little children. The apologies only added more fuel to the Islamist's rage and outcry, for they saw it as justification for their actions.

It is naive to believe that these protests were "spontaneous" movements of Muslims against Islamophobia—as some Islamists and their western apologists would like to tell us. This assault has been in the making for a few months. In September a right-wing Danish newspaper publishes 12 drawings of Muhammad. Islamist groups in Denmark began a campaign against the caricatures of Muhammad. Then, despotic and reactionary Arab regimes, friends or foes of the west, in solidarity with their brethren in Denmark, mounted diplomatic pressure on Denmark. In fact in December the issue was discussed at the Organization of the Islamic Conference (made up of 57 "Islamic countries") that later condemned the cartoons as an "act of blasphemy." In January, Copenhagen prosecutor refused to press charges against the paper. After all efforts to silence the Danish press failed, the Islamist attack dogs were unleashed to commence a violent protest campaign to teach the west a lesson. Professional Islamist hooligans and paid agents of authoritarian and fascist nationalist and Islamist governments and organizations for the most part formed the core of these protests. As the Islamists and the nationalist forces find themselves in a growing conflict with the US and western governments, the cartoons of Muhammad gave them a chance to try to gain advantage over the European and the US government in order to reinforce their position internationally and specifically in the Middle East.

The fascist mobs who are asking the world to hold their prophet in reverence and are expressing outrage at the mocking of Muhammad are the same people who waste no time to impose their reign of terror and barbarity when they come to power or gain any significant political strength. They do not hesitate to spit on and trample upon every bit of human decency and values. These are the same currents that commit daily crimes against humanity. They are the same criminal club- and knife-wielding crowd, resembling the brown-shirt fascists, who beat up protesters and progressive forces that dare to stand up for freedom, equality, and human dignity. They are the same misogynists who brutalize women and regard them as subhumans, the same homophobics who kill and maim those who do not fit their man-fuck-woman-only lifestyle, the same anti-worker forces who suppress any independent workers' protests and organizations, the same people for whom child molesting is a law of god—the list of atrocities has no end. Islamism is not a "protest movement of oppressed nations"; it is an offshoot of the US and western governments' campaign against communism, freedom, human decency, and a better world, in collusion with the nationalist bourgeoisie in Islamism-stricken countries.

The Islamist campaign to impose their taboos and intimidate the world into submission must be confronted head on. It is an attempt to spread their message of hate and brutality across the world. Since long ago, when Ronald Regan called Afghani Islamic criminals "freedom fighters," Islamist regimes and forces, with the knowledge and clear understanding of the western powers and the US government and oil money behind them, have started a quiet but concerted effort to spread their propaganda machinery across the world (including Europe), build political power, and shape Islamist hate groups that are now being instrumentalized to their advantage.

Benefiting from "multiculturalism" and "moral relativism" in the west, they have sought to create and maintain Islamist ghettos and implement their oppressive and reactionary practices. Islamism is a dreadful and grim political movement. The recent uproar over the cartoons only helps highlight the challenges political Islam pose to progressive humanity. The western powers and the US government, as they have demonstrated repeatedly, have no intention to confront this movement. In fact, they have no problem to work hand in hand with the Islamists as long as their cooperation can be secured. They are concerned with their capitalist economic and political interests and domination over the world, not anyone's freedom.

Islamism must be defeated in a political arena. First and foremost, the Islamist's call to limit and suppress freedom of expression must be strongly opposed. Religion and for that matter Islam should not be above criticism. No religion, no god, and no prophet should hold any special privilege. Islamists are free to praise their prophet as long as and as much as they want. However, that is the limit. To demand that the freethinkers must succumb to their taboos is outrageous and preposterous. Islamists should not be allowed to impose their ignorance, taboos, and superstitions on humanity. The right to blasphemy, to question and protest against god, to criticize religious beliefs, to mock religious personalities, is not just equally as important as freedom of worship and religious beliefs—but is rather more essential given the rise of sectarian religious tendencies in the world. Religion as an oppressive industry continues to be a human malaise and catastrophe. It does nothing but propagate ignorance, superstitions, human bondage and submission, bloody conflicts, sectarian wars, and genocides. Freedom from religion is an important safeguard for human liberation and dignity. Requesting respect for "religious sensitivities" as an argument to curb freedom of expression is as preposterous and dangerous as any attempt to silence freethinkers. Freedom has no boundaries and the religious sectarians and fundamentalist fanatics should get used to it. Putting limits on freedom under the pretext of "respect for religion", "emergency situation", "national interest", "security", "war", etc. can only give brutal forces the opportunity to suppress people.

Moreover, separation of religion and the state must be vigorously enforced. Religion and for that matter Islam should be pushed out of public life into mosques, churches, and synagogues where they belong. Reactionary and brutal religious practices that undermine and denigrate human life have to be prohibited. Religious bigotry and discriminatory practices must be outlawed. Children need to be protected from religious proselytizing and industry. Religious teachings should be banned from education, public or private. Children rights and women rights should be expanded and strongly implemented. No public money, not even a cent, should go to religious institutions. Tax laws should be equally applicable to all properties and revenues belonging to religious institutions. To fight religious movements it is inseparable that we fight against bigotry, racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant policies, and ghetoization of immigrant communities, all of which feed into the Islamist movement. Islamism grows in a swamp; that swamp must be dried up.

Freedom from religion and the right to blasphemy must be of particular importance for progressive forces, socialists, and communists in the US. Bush calls himself a "Born Again Christian." Some of his followers believe god chose him to become president of the United States. He is a man who believes his "War on Terrorism" is his "Holy Mission." Bush's ascendancy to power became possible to a large extent due to the growing power of Christian religious bigots who are dreaming of their own apocalyptic Christendom. These reactionary forces, with their vast resources, as well as public money at their disposal through "Faith Based Initiatives," and with their president in office, are chipping away slowly but steadily at our freedom, particularly women's rights, under the guise of "religious sanctities." These are the same people who unleashed criminals to bomb abortion clinics, murder physicians, and assault women seeking abortions, all in defense of "sanctity of life." These messengers of hate have enough taboos and "sanctities" that can create a hellish life if enforced upon the society. To the extent that the power of religion and religious movements grows, freedom and human dignity become its inevitable casualty. Stopping Islamists from imposing their taboos on us is inseparable from our struggle to prevent the Christian bigots from forcing their sanctities on society.

It is similarly crucial that we defend freedom of press and expression. This is a hard-won achievement for humanity that is under a brutal assault by the Islamists. Succumbing to the Islamists' demands will be a dangerous precedent. Not only will it allow them to come up with other outrageous demands, it will also create a fertile ground for all other reactionary forces to make the same argument that such and such "sanctity" or "interest" is in jeopardy, and therefore demand their own limits on press freedom.

It is no secret that the US mainstream media are by and large in the pocket of the US government. We know that without their help, for example, the Iraq war could not have happened. They deliberately refused to publish information that challenged the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We know that under the pretext of "national security", they withhold crucial information from people, or only reveal a a very insignificant part of it. As the Islamists mount an attack on freedom of press, the US media once again have shown their cowardliness by refusing to take a stand in defense of freedom of expression. It is a no-brainer that fighting for press freedom here in this country is of significant importance and that includes beating back the Islamists who want to impose their taboos on the world.

(Salvador Dalí's depiction of the birth of Israel; the desert blooms!)

橘安純の詩

2005-12-30T13:30:00.000+09:00

My mind reeled with excitement and imagination when I passed local poet Tachibana Yasuzumi's improvised house on the bridge spanning over the Tennoji Zoo. Poems, polemics, free jazz schedules, event bulletins were posted on the outside of his house, a soul map of the city for all to consult. I knew that day the city alive with a bright fire.

Tachibana-san was beaten about a week and a half ago by a gang of twenty high school kids out looking for a 'bum' to punish. He fought his attackers and thankfully survived the confrontation. It is with fury and respect that I bring these poems to the world. Thanks are due to Emily for translating the second two poems.

Living outside: Summer

My bicycle cart listens to the rain sounds
Some muddled cardboard, a shut futon, blue rain
Has the passing shower become stronger? Raindrops on my face
The rain falls, my cardboard house melts
Sleeping on the earth, the rain falls, like a river
I've caught a cold, perhaps I'll just let myself die in this rain

Sleeping on the roadside, one by one my embarassments extinguish
Blessed, I no longer hold back
Hungry stomach, dazzling sun I guzzle down water
The long line for lunch In the blazing sun no one speaks
Lumps of lunch work down my stomach, I've eaten too much

Faces of those I know, gradually burnt in the sun
Faces of those I know gradually tired
Faces of those I know, gradually wrinkle deeper
Faces of those I know; the life thins out of them

Trash pride sweat piss the smell of human beings
In the midnight park we bath in the sunken, shooting water

Living outside under one starred sky
Living outside under one starred sky

(an excerpt from 'Living outside, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter')

Alive!

I often do not go to work
I just gave that shit up
Yes, I'm living outside, so what?
This is me, alive!

Rummaging through the garbage, lining up for lunch
My stomach empty, always, anytime
Living outside, what of it
This is me, alive!

Anywhere is fine, a place to sleep
Find some cardboard, this is 'my dream house'
Living outside, so what!
This is me, alive!

Not a thought to my appearance
Being alive, that's the pay-off
Living outside, what of it
This is me, alive!

Lazy fuck

A lazy fuck is a lazy fuck.
He doesn't work and he's got no savings or anything,
So he doesn't go out and he can't treat himself.
He's got no family and lives alone;
City hall doesn't look after him and he lives in poverty.

A lazy fuck is a lazy fuck.
He's not like an ant, but he's certainly not like a
grasshopper.
He doesn't work on behalf of a queen
Or fight any wars for the sake of 'defending society'.
In summer the lazy bastard doesn't dance around playing music
He seeks no help from others just because the 'winter has come'.

A lazy fuck is a lazy fuck.
He lives in places that other people hate
He eats the food that other people won't eat.
The rest of the time he just sits it out
He can't even flex his wasted muscles,
When an enemy approaches, he lies stock still and plays dead.

A lazy fuck is a lazy fuck.
He'll be a lazy fuck for ever.
He lives in places where nobody lives, under the pouring rain.
Steadfastly munching on leaves -
A lazy fuck is a lazy fuck
He'll never be anybody's cherished koala.

Idler

The idler
is always an idling idler.
The idler idles and so he is idle,
I guess there have been times when he wasn't idling
But that might be hard to believe.

He is told 'Waste not!,
but of course he wastes himself, idling.
I suppose the idler becomes idle while idling,
Once an idler, he idles.
A softly sleeping idler.

(Tachibana-san riding the wataribune river-crossing boats on the Ajigawa river)

ドイツはイランを経済的に支援し続ける

2005-12-29T00:33:00.000+09:00

Are 500,000 Keys to Paradise Enough?: Germany "Confronts" Ahmadinejad

BY Matthias Küntzel

In pondering the behavior of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I cannot help but think of the 500,000 plastic keys that Iran imported from Taiwan during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. At the time, an Iranian law laid down that children as young as 12 could be used to clear mine fields. Before every mission, a plastic key would be hung around each of the children’s necks. It was supposed to open for them the gates to paradise.

The “child-martyrs” belonged to the so-called “Basij” movement created by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Basij Mostazafan – the “mobilization of the oppressed” – were volunteers of all ages that embraced death with religious enthusiasm. They provided the model for the first Hezbollah suicide bombers in Lebanon. To this day, they remain a kind of SA of the Islamic revolution. Sometimes they serve as a “vice squad”, monitoring public morals; sometimes they rage against the opposition – as in 1999, when they were used to break the student movement. At all times, they celebrate the cult of self sacrifice.

Ahmadinejad forms part of the first generation of Basiji militants and still today he is often to be seen wearing a Basiji uniform. He would like to bring about a renaissance of the Basiji culture of the 1980s – in order, among other things, to combat the burgeoning Western-oriented youth movement that has, for instance, given rise to some 700,000 weblogs in the last years. Thus Ahmadinejad made a personal appeal this year for Iranians to participate in the annual “Basiji Week” that took place in late November. According to a report in the newspaper Kayan, some 9 million Basiji heeded the call, “forming a human chain some 8,700 kilometers long in which President Ahmadinejad also took part. In Tehran alone, some 1,250,000 people were mobilized.” (Cited in Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, „Bassiji: die revolutionäre Miliz des Iran“, on MEMRI Deutschland.) Ahmadinejad used the occasion to praise the “Basij culture and the Basij power” with which “ Iran today makes its presence felt on the international and diplomatic level”. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Chair of the Guardian Council, went so far as to describe the very existence of Iran’s nuclear program as “a triumph of the young people who serve the Basij movement and possess the Basiji-psyche and Basiji-culture.” He added: “We need an army of 20 million Basiji. Such an army must be ready to live for God, to die along the way of God, and to conduct Jihad, in order to please God.”

Is the Iranian population being thus prepared for the announced nuclear war against Israel? Three years ago, the then Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that a single atom bomb used against Israel “would leave nothing on the ground”, whereas the damage done by a possible retaliatory strike would be limited (source: MEMRI Special Dispatch, 3 January 2002). Even with a million dead, the Islamic world would survive, whereas Israel would be destroyed. Thus the logic of Rafsanjani’s argument. It is this murderous calculation – the sort of calculation that lies at the base of every suicide attack – that distinguishes the atomic ambitions of Iran from the interests of all existing nuclear powers.

If there is a western nation today that has the means to confront such madness with effective sanctions, it is Germany. For the last 25 years, the German government has offered its good offices to the anti-Semitic Mullahs in Tehran with a shamelessness unrivalled by any other western government. In 1984, Hans-Dietrich Genscher was the first western Foreign Minister to pay his respects to the Mullah regime. Ten years later, Germany’s federal intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), trained Iranian intelligence agents in Munich. (See Arthur Heinrich, “Zur Kritik des ‘kritischen Dialogs’”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, May 1996.) And whereas since 1995 American firms are prohibited from trading with Iran, Germany will, in the words of Werner Schoeltzke of the German Near and Middle East Association, , “remain the preferred technology partner of Iran also in the years to come” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 December 2003).

Germany is today by far the most important supplier of goods to Iran and its exports are increasing at a steady 20% per year. In 2004, German exports to Iran were worth some €3.6 billion. At the same time, Germany is the most important purchaser of Iranian goods apart from oil and Iran’s most important creditor.

Since, however, Ahmadinejad provided the world with such a stark reminder of the ideological foundations of the Mullah-dictatorship – Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and the destruction of Israel – Berlin is in a tight spot. On the one hand, Berlin would not like to put in danger Germany’s special relationship with Tehran. On the other hand, it does not look particularly good when the country from which came the Holocaust practitioners now collaborates with the regime of the Holocaust deniers. On 11 December, Germany’s new deputy Chancellor, Franz Müntefering of the SPD, indicated the way out of this dilemma: “Berlin Demands a ‘Reaction’ to Ahmadinejad” ran the headline in the following day’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (12 December 2005). This sounded surprisingly forceful. But whoever read the small type quickly understood the actual meaning of the headline: “ Berlin demands a ‘reaction’ to Ahmadinejad from everyone else”. The deputy Chancellor was cited as follows: “We cannot do it alone. Rather this has to be frankly discussed in the framework of the European Community and it must in the clearest possible terms be discussed in the framework of the United Nations”.

Excuse me? Germany can do nothing on its own? Only the German government can abrogate the 2002 investment agreement between German and Iran. Only Berlin can terminate the “Hermes” export credit guarantees that offer Iran advantages beyond almost any other country. As a consequence of the “Hermes” guarantees, the German state takes over all the specific risks connected with exports to Iran. Already in 1992, exports to Iran enjoyed the second highest level of Hermes guarantees after only Russia, and since then their scope has been continually increased. To bring an end to the privileges that the Mullah-dictatorship thus enjoys is entirely possible, though evidently politically unwanted. Müntefering’s uncompromising rhetoric is just the musical accompaniment to “business as usual”. Thus whereas the German government speaks impressively at the EU summit of sending “a clear signal of the sharpest possible disapproval”, in the Bundestag it speaks sheepishly “of avoiding the isolation [of Iran]”.

And what of Germany’s “Left” opposition? Should we not assume that privileging the most elementary human rights over the interests of the big corporations would be a special concern of the “Greens” or the “the Left” alliance? Far from it. Apart from some few exceptions, the “Left” has not been prepared to allow the Holocaust denier from Tehran to deprive it of its conspiracy theories and rage against “BuSharon”. “If the Iranian President Ahmadinejad did not exist,” writes, for example, the Berlin-based “Green” daily Die Tageszeitung (taz), “the USA and Israel would have had to invent him” (15 December 2005). Ahmadinejad’s words are only to be taken seriously inasmuch as they “provide a welcome pretext for the USA and Israel.”

Thus, on 16 December 2005, all the parties represented in the German Bundestag united to pass a resolution – including not a single word about the German-Iranian special relationship – applauding the Müntefering line: “The German Bundestag welcomes that the German government has stood up to the remarks of the Iranian President.” Yes indeed: Bravo and many more such successes! Given the obvious solicitude for the requirements of German industry, it would not surprise me if Ahmadinejad ordered his next batch of plastic keys for his Basiji from Germany. But will 500,000 keys to paradise be enough for the war against Israel?

Translated from the German by Transatlantic Intelligencer

反独・反反ユダヤ主義・反反シオン主義

2005-12-11T22:36:00.000+09:00

The anti-Semitism of the 68ers
Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke talk with Tilman Fichter about the bomb planted in Berlin's Jewish Community Centre in 1969

On November 9, 1969, on the anniversary of "Kristallnacht", over two hundred people were gathered in Berlin's Jewish Community Centre in commemoration of the victims of Nazi Germany. Unbeknownst to them, a member of the radical Left student movement "Tupamaros West Berlin" planted a bomb in the building. The device failed to explode because the clock meant to trigger it off was connected by a rusty wire. The Tupamaros saw themselves as Germany's first urban guerillas, inspired by the Latin American role model. The brains behind the plot was Dieter Kunzelmann, a leftist radical political clown, founder of the "Kommune 1" and self-proclaimed "kingpin of Chaos". In the wake of the six-day war of 1967, Kunzelmann saw Israel as an imperial state and oppressor of the Palestinians, which must be resisted with force. His opponents inside the Left, who maintained a more nuanced view of the situation in the Middle East, accused him of having a "Jew complex".

This summer, Wolfgang Kraushaar published "Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus" (the bomb in the Jewish Community Centre). The book reveals previously unknown information on the 1969 plot, and sparked a heated debate about anti-Semitism in the German Left in general and in the 68er movement specifically. According to historian Götz Aly, "the German 68ers were wretchedly similar to their parents." Journalist Micha Brumlik pinpoints "the radical Left rebellion against their parents' Nazi generation as a contradictory process of identification with them and their hatred of Jews."

Kraushaar's research revealed why the Berlin police had failed (or wanted to fail) in their examination of the case. Kraushaar identified Albert Fichter as the man who placed the bomb. Fichter was given the explosives – and this detail warrants further discussion – by an agent provocateur from the Berlin intelligence service who had long had the "Tupamaros West Berlin" under surveillance. Allegedly the bomb was tinkered with so it would fail to explode. Tilman Fichter, Albert's brother, at the time chairman of the SDS (German socialist student group), explains in an interview why it was and still is taboo to talk about anti-Semitism on the Left.

[Click below to read the full interview]

taz: Mr. Fichter, you helped your brother Albert, who laid the bomb in the Jewish Community Centre in 1969, to escape from Germany...

Tilman Fichter: ... yes, twice in fact, because he didn't realise he was under surveillance.

Why did you help him?

Because he shared a flat with Dieter Kunzelmann, and I thought Kunzelmann was a difficult, unpleasant comrade whose influence on my brother was anything but positive.

What do you mean by "difficult and unpleasant comrade"?

We threw Kunzelmann and his "Kommune 1" out of the SDS in 1967 because he was always distributing leaflets which argued the opposite position to the SDS, on the grounds that he and the commune were anti-authoritarian. And he refused to abide by any resolutions, although the resolutions were arrived at in plenary meetings and were therefore relatively democratic. It also had to do with the happenings he staged, such as when he burned papier mache figures of East German leader Walter Ulbricht and US vice-president Hubert Humphrey on Kurfürstendamm boulevard. Nobody understood what that was supposed to mean. It was idiotic. But he saw himself primarily as an artist, not a political person.

Where was Kunzelmann living in 1969?

In a supposedly secret flat of the Tupamaros West Berlin which was known to everyone in the leftist scene. It was the time of the split in the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO): Christian Semler founded the KPD/AO (German Communist Party/ Set-Up Organisation), Joscha Schmierer, who worked in the planning department in the Foreign Office during the Red Green coalition, founded the KBW, the West German Communist Federation, in Heidelberg. And the Trotskyists founded their mini parties.

Why did you think it was dangerous for your brother to share a flat with Kunzelmann?

It very soon became clear that Kunzelmann is an anti-Semite.

When did you realise this?

In November 1969, when we published his first letter to the public in our radical left-wing magazine 883, the "Letter from Amman". At the time I played down the letter, saying it was leftist anti-Semitism. If I read it again today I have to say: he's an anti-Semite. Kunzelmann's main word was "fight", not "emancipation" or anything like that. He wrote: "Palestine is for the BRD what Vietnam was for the Americans. The Left has failed to comprehend this. Why? The Jew complex." His argument was that because the Left was coming to terms with the causes of Auschwitz, it was failing to realise that the real enemy was sitting in Israel and that one should show solidarity with the Palestinians. This was a complete break in the highly complex debate taking place with the West German Left, which was critical of Israeli politics, but with an eye to the fact that the situation in Palestine after 1937/39 had been shaped by the Zionists trying to accommodate hundreds of thousands of European Jews. It was not a black and white issue. Kunzelmann blankly refused to accept this nuanced analysis. This was a break with the analytical tradition of the SDS, and an attempt to lead parts of the West German Left into a partisan struggle against the Jews in Germany.

Your brother Albert Fichter claims that Kunzelmann constantly referred to the "damn Jews" – did he do this in front of you too?

Not in front of me.

Apparently he said to Daniel Cohn-Bendit: "You're nothing but a little Jewish pig."

I could well imagine it. I just know that Kunzelmann's writings at the time, seen from today's perspective, do not qualify as leftist anti-Semitism, but as anti-Semitism tout court.

Why did so few left-wingers see this at the time?

Lots of them couldn't believe their ears! They simply weren't prepared for that sort of thing. It was the equivalent today of a group of young men in the taz standing up and saying the oppression of women is progressive. It'd take weeks for you to figure out what was happening among the editors – and that's how it was for us. At first we just couldn't believe our ears. I didn't make any friends by saying this was leftist anti-Semitism.

What was the reaction in 1969 among the radical Left to the plot to blow up the Jewish Community Centre? As Wolfgang Kraushaar appropriately puts it, this was Kunzelmann's attempt to regain his authority among the militants...

... yet he failed utterly. In Kunzelmann's diary, which is now in the hands of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, he wrote – and he'll be kicking himself now because it was his vanity that made him write it – that he was on the verge of desperation because the German Left was not prepared to support his campaign with the PLO against the Jews. Kunzelman never made the distinction between the Jews in the diaspora and the State of Israel. This is why he was completely on his own in the radical Left.

The fact that the attack targeted Jews in Germany as Israelis and also the date, November 9, leave no doubt that it was an act of anti-Semitism. The radical Left in no way supported Kunzelmann – but it barely recognised this as a clear instance of anti-Semitism. Why not?

It's absolutely astonishing. The fake bomb was not taken very seriously at all back then. As I remember it, I was one of a very few to react it, with my article "What is anti-Semitism?" in Agit 883 (underground paper -ed). For a long time the subject was not breached on the Left. To put it rather cynically: as usual the friends of East Germany put the blame on the Right. That was their standard response to anything that was complicated in any way. And in this instance the anti-authoritarian Left seemed to be content to accept this line of argumentation.

And why the date, November 9, the anniversary of the pogrom in 1938?

My brother writes in his "confession" in Kraushaar's book that he didn't even know the significance of November 9 at the time. He was apparently so full of LSD that it didn't even dawn on him. The commune members didn't discuss things analytically or with a view to history. Their lives were all about the struggle. When you read this today, you recognise echoes of the thirties and the movement in Germany whose focal point was also the struggle, or "Kampf".

The bomb was supplied by the intelligence. Did you know that at the time?

Yes, I was aware that the bomb was provided by intelligence agent Peter Urbach. Kunzelmann let himself be supplied with defect bombs from the stockpiles of the German intelligence. And anyway it was a fake.

Was the bomb in the Jewish Community Centre a fake? Wasn't it rather a bomb that failed to explode?

I call that a fake bomb. It couldn't explode.

But only because of a technical defect.

All bombs that came from Urbach had this technical defect. They couldn't explode. Another fake bomb was later found in Kunzelmann's freezer. The intelligence irresponsibly tried to smuggle these things into the student movement. But one way or another, Urbach's superiors were aware they didn't want to plant any active bombs – unlike a few months later when Peter Urbach provided the first generation of the RAF with real weapons.

Has that been proven?

Yes. But it has yet to be found out who was behind the attempt to arm the student movement. Peter Urbach now lives in the USA, under protection and with a false name. He could clear things up at least partially. But no one has ever tried.

But we still don't understand. Why did the Left fail to understand how scandalous the attack was back then?

At that time we faced a twofold challenge. On one side we were fighting the US war in Vietnam. There were demonstrations nearly every day – it's almost impossible to imagine this sort of thing nowadays. We were permanently in action. On the other hand the extra-parliamentary opposition had just split. I made the mistake of thinking that this New Left could still be held together, and joined the editors of Agit 883. That was completely idealistic. Then in early 1970 I abandoned the attempt when I saw these city Tupamaros were just using me. Agit 883 informally belonged to Dirk Schneider. He was later uncovered as a Stasi agent active in the Green Party exectutive.

So the continual mobilisation was what prevented people from seeing this anti-Semitic attack. But why did almost it take decades for the Left to start talking about it?

It was taboo.

What was taboo?

It was taboo to say there could be something like anti-Semitism on the Left. Because the Left had been a victim, because it had suffered together with the Jews in the concentration camps, it never thought it possible that this problem could also exist in its own ranks. I was severely criticised at the time, even by comrades I still think highly of today. They said, "Tilman, you shouldn't make such a big thing of it. We can settle this internally." When I started discussing it openly with my article on anti-Semitism I was treated like a bit of a renegade, as if I were eroding solidarity on the Left, and opening a can of worms that had to be cleared up among ourselves. But it was never cleared up. That was the problem.

The SDS had been pro-Israeli, at times even Semitophile, before 1967. Why did it turn a blind eye to this anti-Semitic aberration?

No, you're assuming something there. The SDS was always on very good terms with leftist Zionist groups, even long before 1969. The SDS saw itself as a support group for the leftist Zionists in Israel that had been against the Israeli occupation policy since 1967. At a key SDS congress in 1967, comrades from Heidelberg had submitted a resolution that the SDS should break off all ties to Israel. I was there! Rudi Dutschke intervened and threatened that if that went through, if the Maoists mobilised a majority, then the Berlin contingent would get up and leave. Rudi was very clear that it shouldn't come to a vote. He was on very good terms with leftist Zionist circles, and held no anti-Semitic positions. It didn't come to a vote, and the question was deferred. Then came the attack on Rudi, and with it we lost our most reflective friend of the Israeli Left. For as long as the SDS continued to function, he prevented the West German Left from taking an openly anti-Israeli stance.

Some of the sympathisers of the SDS back then - Günther Maschke, Reinhold Oberlercher, Horst Mahler und Bernd Rabehl – are now more or less open anti-Semites.

Or at least right-wing nationalists.

Don't their biographies point to a long-standing if disavowed anti-Semitic undercurrent in the movement?

I can't say if that was always the case with Mahler and the others. I didn't know them well enough. Those are five people out of roughly 3,000 in the hard core of the SDS. It's appalling that there were people like Mahler at all in the New Left. But we're talking about an infinitesimal minority in the student movement back then, you've got to keep that in mind.

Did the SDS make mistakes back then?

Good question. I'd say it was a mistake that Rudi didn't insist that the Israeli occupation policy and the growing anti-Semitism in parts of the student body be discussed at the student conference in 1967. Instead we kept the question from the agenda with tactical manoeuvres. We didn't take the subject of underlying anti-Semitism in the German Left at all seriously. That was a mistake.

One of the major impetuses for the 68er movement was its rejection of the pall of silence surrounding acts committed by their parents. Then in 1969 an anti-Semitic act was committed within its own ranks, or to be more exact: on its margins – and everyone was evidently so busy with the revolution or Vietnam that they didn't see it?

That's right.

Yet the contradiction remains. We have to free ourselves from the idea that the second generation after the Holocaust, the children of the perpetrators, would have been able to simply cast off the inheritance of their parents with a sweep of the hand. There was an unconscious relationship of delegating between generations – perhaps the younger generation's eternal comparison of Israel with the Nazis was an unconscious attempt to qualify their parents' guilt...

Maybe for some people.

Some social psychologists even see the street battles of 1968 as an attempt by the children to recreate the violence experienced by their parents. Is there anything in that?

I think that kind of speculation doesn't get you anywhere. It just turns the facts upside down. My experience was: German society was full of violence after 1945. That violence didn't come from us. In January of 1952 for example, SDS students demonstrated against the new films by Veit Harlan, who'd made the hate film "Jud Süß" under the Nazis. They got severely beaten up. Another example: We wore shirts and ties to the anti-Shah demo on July 2, 1967, and were chased by the police. It's a wonder there weren't three or four deaths, and that only Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed. The violence was in society. There was violence among the Berlin police and the population as a whole. At the time it was a real hate-society. When we demonstrated against the US Vietnam policies, 80 percent of the population was against us. Nowadays you can't start to imagine what it was like! For us students it was like running the gauntlet.

A lot of people went underground. Did you ever toy with the idea?

No. I was about ten years older, I finished high-school at night school and I'd spent time at sea. My motto was: rebellion is justified, but we're going to lose. When you're in the minority, you can't force your opinions onto the majority. That was the subject of a lot of my discussions with Rudi Dutschke. He was the only one I could talk to about things like that. Rudi understood my position, even though he thought it was wrong. In the mid sixties, the majority of society didn't want to think about the taboo of genocide. Yet culturally, the student movement was a lot more successful than I'd thought was possible.

So you never wanted to go underground?

No, I was always against making yourself illegal – just like I was against the RAF and the idea that the first RAF generation had been murdered in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart. It took a long time for the German Left to take a critical look at itself. It'd had its back against the wall for a long time, and didn't have the chance to think about itself.

That also goes for the Left's relationship to Kunzelmann. In fact after 1969 it should have been clear he was an anti-Semite. Nonetheless he was a representative for the Alternative List (AL) in the Berlin state parliament in the 1980s. Why did the AL think they could win the elections with Kunzelmann?

Because it didn't take the subject seriously. In 1984 when I raised the topic of anti-Semitism on the Left again, it came to nothing. Now Kraushaar is trying it again – and I'm afraid it still won't lead to anything. Together with the others I excluded Kunzelmann from the SDS. But I have to admit, I never really took him seriously. I always thought of him as a dangerous clown. And that's still how people on the Left think. They should stop trying to play down the problem and call anti-Semitism by its name. But I don't think we'll be able give this problem the attention it deserves.

Why was Kunzelmann so popular?

In fact I don't think he was so popular. He was physically a wreck because of all the drugs he took. It was only when he went to prison that he finally got a grip on himself. But I'll put the ball back in your court: The press always found him interesting and played along with him. For the press he was a lot more attractive than the SDS and its serious discussions. Kunzelmann said: "I rub shit in your face." He was full of bawdy jokes, in the tradition of Luther somehow. But he was also a bawdy anti-Semite. He always read Bild Zeitung, and complained that the Left didn't understand that Bild was the best paper of all: "They always write nice things about me" (Bild Zeitung is often held responsible for the death of Rudi Dutschke, on account of the virulent hate campaign mounted by the paper - ed). That was all he cared about. For us on the other hand, Bild Zeitung was a threat. A hate paper.

Did you criticise your brother for what he did?

It was only on Christmas 2001 that he told me he was the one who carried the bomb into the Community Centre. When he told me we had a long argument.

But your brother says you know he'd laid the bomb as early as the 1980s...

Yes, but that's wrong. The first I heard about it was in 2001, after our mother died. He told me about it, and explained why he was only telling me then. At all costs he'd wanted to prevent our mother from finding out about it. She'd been active against the Nazis and considered herself a friend of Israel. My brother certainly felt shame at what he'd done. I told him. "Abi, what you did isn't anti-Zionist, it's anti-Semitic." He agreed that it was totally wrong, but maintained it was an anti-Zionist action. I said: "If you act against the Jews in the diaspora and hold them responsible for the Israeli occupation policy, then you're doing exactly what the neo-Nazis do, namely equating the Jews in the diaspora with the Israelis." It took a long time for that to sink in. Three days later we were at the place of a mutual friend from the youth movement. My brother asked our friend if he also thought what he did was anti-Semitic. All our friend said was: "Of course it was." Now my brother accepts that, but it took a while.

What do you mean "youth movement"?

The Boy Scouts, but the religiously unaffiliated ones. By the way, that's another thing the 68ers haven't ever dealt with. A whole lot of people in the Berlin SDS came from the Boy Scouts or the "Bündische Jugend" youth movement. But no one's ever talked about that.

In 1969 you helped your brother escape to Sweden. Would you have done that if you'd known he was the one who planted the bomb on November 9?

No. I wouldn't have helped him if I'd known. I'd have left him on the street, to his own defences. I told him that, too. I wouldn't have handed him over to the police, you don't do that to your own brother. But I wouldn't have helped him. That would have been bitter for him – and for me too.

How do you get on with him today? Do you feel he deceived you?

No, we get along fine. To be honest, I'm happy I didn't know about it for so long. That way I could help him. He's my brother after all.

And why does he write that you've known about what he did since the 80s?

I also thought I knew about it. But then we sat down and thought about it, and came to the conclusion that I hadn't known. All I knew was that he was part of the Tupamaros West Berlin. He was also on one of the first RAF wanted posters – wrongly so. And just a couple of weeks ago he told me something else: the fake bomb was wrapped in Tommy Weisbecker's coat – and he came from a Jewish family. His father – as far as I know – was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp for being a Jew and a communist. And Dieter Kunzelmann, that scumbag, should explain once and for all why he'd had the bomb wrapped in Weisbecker's coat. Tommy's father was a dentist, and Tommy broke into his safe to steal gold, on order from the Tupamaros. Imagine! The Nazis had been the ones to take all the gold from the jaws of their Jewish victims. What kind of mind has Kunzelmann got? He could have sued me as far back as 1984. But he didn't. And he knows perfectly well why not.

*

The article originally appeared in German in die tageszeitung on October 25, 2005.
(http://www.signandsight.com/features/434.html)

資本主義と決裂　((capitalism and rupture))

2005-12-11T22:30:00.000+09:00

Demonstration against the eviction of autonomous parks in Osaka and against the cessation of welfare payments for somen and mochi.

自主公園の排除やそめんもち代止めに対する行進。

'Dismantle the Emperor system'

'Halt evictions/Smash repression!'

We fight for freedom!

For a rupturous winter...

決裂のある冬を。。。

MEMORIAL FOR THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

2005-07-13T21:28:00.000+09:00

MEMORIAL FOR THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas)
(personal impressions by Nemeton [www.darkmattersoundsystem.com])

Please first go to the official website in English or German to look here at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by architect Peter Eisenman:

http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/en?PHPSESSID=597ea3a4b3bb82acdb179aba930e0c9d

The plan for this memorial has been about 17 years in the making, with vocal and publicized discussions beginning in 1988. The memorial is a extremely contentious issue in Germany and for Berlin. At the heart of the matter is how the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) will nationally recognize, represent and memorialize the Holocaust. As central to politicized memorial is the issue of the singularity of Jewish experience in the Holocaust. There has been a extremely contentious debate (philosophical, political, ethical) on this issue since the 1950s. These words, singularity or uniqueness, express that genocide, mass industrial extermination, was specifically engineered and developed strategically to be the fate for Jews in Europe. Although many other types (that the National Socialists identified through detailed organization mechanisms as "threats") included people of mixed marriages, multi-racial backgrounds, political dissidents, gypsies, homosexuals, "deviants", non-workers, the disabled, non-Aryan, etc., and who were selected for forced labor, concentration camps, and death camps, it was the Jewish "race" that was to be totally eliminated first and primarily. Please refer to the article in English by Moishe Postone titled "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism" (http://www.asayake.org/postone1.html ) for a highly developed critique of the dynamics of economically based Anti-Semitism based in the materialist circumstances of capitalist cycles of production and consumption, industrialization, and capitalist democracy.

10 years into this debate on the memorial, the German parliament (Bundestag) finally took action and made the memorial project national and concretized the central ideas that would be addressed. The Bundestag voted for the project to be the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe," rather than dedicated to all victims of the Holocaust, or all victims of Fascism. (The strategic terminology to describe Holocaust as an experience of "all victims of Fascism" was used by the USSR and the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) to diminishing the centrality of the Jew experience in the Holocaust, a strategy that operated in conjunction with USSR’s own repression of Jews during and after WW2.)

I really want to write about is the actual experience of the memorial itself. The physical, emotional, intellectual and psychological experience. I had some preconceptions about what it would be, and was particularly nervous to actually see the memorial based on the changes to architectural design of the memorial forced through in parliamentary vote by the conservative politicians. At issue is the fact that the memorial is located just down the street from the Reichstag, the parliamentary building, most of the government offices located in the Platz der Republic or across the Spree River, the Tiergarten, the Brandeburger Tor, and the former Berlin Wall. This is the central government area of Berlin and to place a memorial here demonstrates physically the centrality of the Holocaust to the German government, people and history, today and in the past. The field of steele were first designed to be quite tall, much taller than a standing individual without having the ground of the site sunk down. The effect of the original memorial design would have been extremely noticeable and striking, at definitive memorial at the heart of central Berlin. This original plan was reworked several times to the final design which we have today in which the field of steele appear from the street to be quite low, maybe knee level, but in actuality the ground is sunk down so that as you descend down into the central area of the memorial the steele rise dramatically taller than the viewer.

The Berlin memorial operates as an intense phenominological experience, as it is designed explicitly for people to traverse in and through the space of the site. Unlike a traditional memorial such as the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial designed by Natan Rappaport, which is a large high relief bronze sculpture depicting women, children, men struggling against the National Socialists in various ways, this Berlin memorial has no typical iconographic representational schemas. The Berlin memorial isn't about images representing history which are easy understood, such as a child suffering that can easily ignite sympathetic emotions. Memorials like the one in the Warsaw Ghetto gives the viewer a representation of history, what happened, who suffered, why it is important. There is little mental work to be done to understand the history depicted. Furthermore, the iconographic representations of this sort lends itself to function as an image of the past: the viewer sees timeless images, depictions of events that happened in the past, not history that is affecting the past, present and future. Traditional memorials also impose certain accepted modes of decorum and interaction which compound to possibly distance the ways in which the viewer can interact with the memorial.

The Berlin memorial radically changes the idea and the physicality of the traditional memorial. The memorial contains no iconographic representation, although we can interpret the field of steele on a variety of symbolic levels. When the viewer stands at the edge of the site one has an expansive view, of the whole field of steele. The architectural design of the site makes it appear that the steele are not tall. As soon as you start to traverse the site, your experience immediately changes. The steele are all the same width and length , but are different heights. Initially the steele are knee or waist height and the concentration of steele is slightly lower than in the interior of the site. There are certain areas where there are no steele, an open void. The multiple and infinite paths between the steele are made of small gray squares 8 between each steele with little gray pebbles between each small gray square. The ground materials give a very tactile, rough feeling to the space that contrasts to the smooth, dull feel of the steele. As you walk into the site it becomes apparent that the ground is in fact slopped, but rolling. It feels as if you are both ascending and descending into the field of steele. If you are at any convergence of any 2 pathways you can see in all four directions to the edges of the site. You have an expansive view even if you are standing near the tallest steele. But if you stand between 2 steele then you can only see in front and in back of you.

When traversing the space into the center, the steele grow taller and the feeling becomes much more isolating: you don’t know where you are going since there are infinite paths through the site; you don’t know when and who you will meet as you walk straight ahead or turn a corner, but you hear other people. There is less light as the steele are taller and the steele cast shadows upon each other; your shadow is also cast upon the steele. The steele are a dark charcol grey color, smooth, very nice to touch, not necessarily cold like stone is cold, but cool. There is a play of light and shadow between the steele, a jagged design of fragmented lines and depths of gray spread over the site. The steele appear to be slightly leaning when you look down the ailes, a forest of crooked, disjointed structures. There are just endless symbolic relationships you can draw out between the physically of the site and history and experience of the Holocaust.

I had many thoughts as I walked through the space. At first when I could see the expanse of the site I walked “strategically”: I made active decisions about where to turn, where to walk, if I wanted to follow another person, if I wanted to see what was over there, etc. As I started to descend into the space more, the ground swells and ebbs like a series of waves and the steele get much taller. At this point for me the experience became much more emotional, closed in, less "strategic" or "instrumental," but as if I was traversing space that was not only physical but an evocation of emotional - psychological relationship to space. I found myself wandering, not trying to go from x to y, but just wandering, feeling emotions that I associate with the Holocaust, thinking about the symbolism of the site, thinking about illusions, about associations. It is very powerful.

Although I don’t know for sure, I would suggest that the architect Eisenmann might have been referencing Situationist thinking or psychogeographical ideas because this is a space to interact with on many levels. Nothing is given to you, nothing is explained to you, there is no apparent connection between the field of steele and the Holocaust. Yet this is why I would argue that the memorial is so powerful. You are forced because of the physicality and the design to interact with the site on multiple levels. Even if you don’t have a thought in your head about Jewish suffering, the site is in itself still an experience, a physical encounter that forces you to on a somewhat mental plan to deal with the space you are in.

In the German press after the memorial was opened in May 2005, there was a big debate about how people use the memorial site. Very unexpectedly, unusual things happened that did not coincide with somber or decorous behaviour associated with traditional memorials. Little kids ran around the steele playing hide and seek. Young kids jumped on tops of the steele, one to the next. People sunbathed on the steele, or sat or talked. Others laid flowers on the steele, a more traditional use of the memorial space. The appropriation of the space for any and all activity seems to be central to the site. Now there are one or two security guards around, but generally after staying there for about 2 hours people could do whatever they wanted. A central problem to traditional memorials is that what is represented and how the viewer is to understand or interact with the messages is already given. It is an official explanation for which one passively accepts. Here at the Berlin memorial people have appropriated an official space (which lacks iconographic representation, but is still officially promoted by the government) for there own uses. One might suggest that the memorial space has become a “civic” site, a place of gathering. Although the "civic" quality may be lessened by that fact that really only tourists go to this area of Berlin, I would at minimum argue that the appropriation of space and the site’s usefulness are key ways in which the memorial operates outside the parameters of traditional memorials.

The German press lamented that people acted inappropriately when they laugh or play on site, that they should be solomn as would be fitting a traditional memorial. In fact, I would counter this by noting that through the present use of the site for many activities, people are making living history. They are not relating to history (the Holocaust) nostalgically as if it is only to be passively remembered as something that happened long ago with little effect today, but that there is a present-ness and a future quality to the history of the Holocaust and the site. The history is lived, it is interacted with in manifold ways, unique to each individual who comes to the site. Personal thinking-mediation at the memorial may focus for some on the death, the destruction and the dying as fundamental experiences of the Holocaust. The field of steel may reference, for example, the ancient Greek grave stones were called steele, usually made of gray stone with high relief carving, inscribed or were plain slabs. The steele in the Berlin memorial could be interpreted as referencing grave markers or people who died, although I wouldn’t pin a particular meaning onto the steele or the site. In this context where individuals interact with the memorial space, there also appears through this engagement to be a dialogue formed between the dead and the dying and the living. Life is re-emphasized. In direct solidarity the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, one might also see that people did survive and so did the Jewish religion and traditions. I think that site operates to both acknowledge the loss at the core of the Holocaust, but also through its appropriation by people that there is life. There is an element of play in the site’s appropriation, which might be viewed as an acknowledgment that history continues into the present...

The rationality of the memorial is apparent. The spaces between the steele is uniform, the width and length of the steele are uniform, the site itself has an exact measurement, it is a mathmatical grid plan. The rationality of the site, of the architecture, is confronted by the "irrationality, emotionality, mental thinking" of the way that people use the space. This dichotomy of rationality-irrationality for me clearly alludes to the Holocaust, the scientific management of gas chambers, train schedules, with the irrationality of experience of murderous death, the perverted thinking of Anti-Semitism, the reasons for such deadly mechanization of life…

This is one interpretation of the power of the memorial: meaning, the way one chooses to think about memory and history, the way one moves through the space is manifold, multiple. There is no given, no set way to interpret the site or history of the Holocaust. One has to do this work oneself. I think the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe answers clearly Theodor W. Adorno’s (and others’) call that each individual and society as a whole must take an active, mental, emotional, physical relationship to the events of the Holocaust. One ought to, if one desires to, actively engage with memory and history ....

Notes and Recommendations: Please see the works of Jean Amery, a socialist who was captured by the SS in Belgium, imprisoned in Auschwitz III and spent much of his life fighting to maintain a living, critical memory of the holocaust:

Jean Améry: A Biographical Introduction

The Asayake Blog will be more regular from here on out. Expect in the relatively near future:

A critical analysis of the left's approach to capitalism, disaster and Islamic fascism.
The second part of 'Beheading Scylla: Fascism in the age of Empire'
ガザ地区からの撤退は解放的な未来を本当にめざしますか？A dissection of the Gaza pull-out and its implications/forebodings for an emancipatory future
News from Japanese struggles

立ち上がれ！Tachiagare (stand up)!

2005-07-13T21:18:00.000+09:00

Beheading Scylla (Part 1)

2005-03-10T22:15:00.000+09:00

Beheading Scylla: Fascism in the Age of Empire

What is fascism and what does it mean to oppose it?

This is a question that everyone serious about fighting for a human community should address; if we do not, if we fail to understand the fullness of fascism's capacity for seizing the human imagination, we've already stepped into defeat.

Fascism is most simply a movement against bourgeois society, against the chaos of capitalism and for its stabilization through the attendant organs of capitalist society, the state, the workplace and the family; fascism exists totally apart from the state but can make use of it. Fascism is an anti-capitalist movement which can emerge during political and/or capitalist crisis, but does not necessarily do so. Fascism doesn't work for the capitalists, it in fact has its own plans entirely, involving the annihilation of the chaos-causing component(s) of capitalism i.e. finance capital and, finally, the working class. This 'chaos-causing component of capital' comes in different forms, but in the European context always stood for finance capital, 'the Jew', the rentier, communists and the 'parasitic men of money'.

Marx understood capitalism as a system which procures its existence from the cleavage of value into exchange and use value components. Use value can be understood as the bagel that you eat when you're hungry while exchange value is the money you pay for that bagel, which is itself a monetarization of your own labor. In other words, in the context of capitalism, use value is the direct, useful aspect of an item. Exchange value is that item's value in the context of a market, an item made equivalent to others.

The becoming of economy as a system of value, the beginning of capitalism, is classically understood with the British example of the foreclosure of the agricultural commons, which involved the evacuation of farmers from that land, its sale to capitalists and their exodus to the manufacturing centers of the city. Thus ended subsistence farming in Western Europe. From that point on, the individual confronts capital as a salesman of labor power, the one commodity which capitalism leaves him with. Capitalism is therefore a total overturn of power relations, a community of capital totalizes economic processes into universal equivalence, currency. The individual is bound to production and experiences it as an alien force, and the proletariat, a mass which is dispossessed radically, makes its appearance. [i]

Fascism emerged as a negative critique of this historical process; its European version despised the bourgeoisie but also taught a European proletariat to embrace itself as the living embodiment of socialism. For fascists, socialism is embodied in what existed before the mutilating octopus of capitalism came. And yet history would not be so cut and dry. In the context of fascism's rise to power in Europe, this mythology had to be tied both ideally to pre-capitalist feudalism and in practice to the massive industrialism of pre-war Europe. This resulted in the infamous train schedules of Mussolini and Hitler's scorched earth productivism, each grinding the proletariat to a pulp under the aegis of 'organic' 'national socialism'. Fascists point to the glory of days gone by (the Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire) where the messy money of capitalism was gone and the volk 'thrived'.

Because fascism is incapable of destroying the capital relation, when it assumes power it is charged with resolving the contradictions of capitalism. It does this practically, but also ideologically. In practice, the binding of the working class to the state takes place via the unions, which are either beaten into submission, co-opted internally or simply go over themselves, having imbibed the appeals to national unity. As institutions of capitalism and not against it, unions are mediators between capital and an otherwise atomized working class, they are subject to the tendencies that pass through both actors. Unions are charged with de-activating insurrectionary tendencies in the rank and file, and maintaining the general separateness of the community of capital which keeps it functioning. Their experience in these matters is useful to fascism when it takes power in moments of crisis.

Even the most radical post-union organizations such as worker's councils (where workers take over the means of production and set their own production schedules) were praised by Mussolini: "No social transformation which is necessary is repugnant to me. Hence I accept the famous workers' supervision of the factories and equally their cooperative social management; I only ask that there should be a clear conscience and technical capacity, and that production be increased. If this is guaranteed by the trade unions, instead of by the employers, I have no hesitation in saying that the former have the right to take the latter's place." [ii] Because fascism seeks any means towards restoring and controlling capital, even those forms which appear to be most powerful, most levelling, most imminent, are in fact tolerable, in preparation for recuperation and eventual bludgeoned submission. As long as capital is in control, i.e. as long as there exists a compulsion to produce that is alien to the decision-making of those immediately concerned and as long as the worker is separated from her means of existence, capital grinds on and the fascists are pleased.

The ideological component of fascist revolution is the necessary corollary of use-value's primacy, e.g. the eradication of exchange value. Exchange value is the chaotic component of capitalism, that which renders it unstable and prone to crises. Fascists hate the accumulation of money, the 'hoarding Jew', banks and anything else related to the power of exchange value. By annihilating exchange value and affirming use value, fascists create a socialism of men, inevitably based on blood lineage and family ties, which is the shape society takes around the subsistence division of labor. Thus, as J Sakai points out accurately in his essay 'The Shock of Recognition', fascism is at essence a movement of men. The primacy of patriarchy is bound up within an affirmation of feudalism, a divided society that, unlike capitalism's free association of dispossessed producers, finds unity in the petty ownership of men, in 'blood and soil'.

And so for fascism, blood becomes useful as the defining link between subjects and the state. In an anti-bourgeois world, where the conviviality and constituent communities that make up, yet simultaneously stand against capitalism are destroyed and suppressed, blood steps in. The third Reich resurrects the Aryan race as a substitute for the smashed capitalism of the bourgeois; pan-Arabism becomes a hegemonic discourse in the post-war oil-rich Middle East and the British Nationalist Party as well as the far right in Germany both steep in the sewage of the 'white race' in order to craft a narrative of invisible unity that can avoid the border-smashing ethics of communist internationalism.

A common myth regarding fascism is that it stands for racial supremacism. This simply is no longer true with the rise of what is known as third positionism, i.e. the idea that the world stage is an interplay of oppressor nations and oppressed nations, and therefore nations need to liberate themselves so that we can all live in global subsistence far far from the tentacles of the 'capitalist hydra' aka the WTO, the IMF, America and Israel. It's a sincere question whether the race theories of Hitler, which were based on the German romanticism of Herder, played out as supremacist even when they were in bloody progress. As a fascist manager of the capitalist state and the initiator of conquerance wars, Hitler needed to attack the British empire in all of its imperial holdings, and to that end found relationships of convenience with both the Japanese and the Arabs of the former Ottoman empire, preserving the capitalist relations of German empire that had so carefully been cultivated by Bismarck and the Kaiser. Hitler's alliances indeed came at the cost of supremacism, perhaps a goal to be 'achieved' one day, perhaps just lost to the contradictions of capitalism and civilizations.

These notes from a Berlin summit between Jerusalem-based Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, who was instrumental in organizing anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine, show the extent of this alliance:

"Germany advocates an all-out war against the Jews. This naturally includes the struggle against the Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was nothing but a national center of the destructive influence of Jewish interests. ... At the moment, Germany was in a struggle of life and death against two bastions of Jewry: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. ... He (Hitler) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated. In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.

As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Fuehrer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection in Arab lands. In this moment, the Mufti would be the competent voice of the Arab world. It would be incumbent on him to trigger the clandestinely prepared Arab action. ... The Grand Mufti replied that he believed everything would implement itself such as the Fuehrer had indicated."

Fascism's reach was necessarily beyond Europe. It is only now in a post-modern age of massive communication that we see the twin discourses of European and non-European fascism rising, apart in their singularities but further and further tied together in historical imaginary, virulence of hatred and nihilistic terrorism. As we will see later, fascism's affects and its sensation of 'liberation' were to spread abroad, and indeed take on a life of their own in the third world as it liberated itself from colonialism in bloody revolution. These post-World War I fascist-colony relations would prove durable.

Questions remain. When can we understand dictatorial movements of the post-colonial third world as fascist, and to what extent is this useful? How and why does fascism take effect? What are the implications of the fascist hatred of finance capital, especially for Jews and Israel? Is there such thing as fascism from above? What is the alternative to fascist anti-capitalism? Can fascism be contained by liberal democracy? Is it possible to embrace the best of bourgeois society and push towards its overcoming by a human community called communism, without collapsing into a forever-in-waiting anti-fascism?

Part II of this discussion will continue the discussion of the fabric of fascism and expand its span into the post-colonial world, demonstrating how fascism and the legacies of European romanticism have contributed to Islamist discourses in order to create a new barbarism against the Bourgeois, an embrace of death tied explicitly to the resurgence of collectivism and the suppression of the individual.

Further study:

'Anti-Semitism and National Socialism' by Moishe Postone

'Global Fascism' by Rajeev Patel & Philip McMichael

'Islamism, Fascism and Terrorism' by Mark Erikson

Matthias Kuentzel's writings

[Notes]

[i] The story isn't as simple in the rest of the world. Subsistence farming alongside exchange-based production of petty commodities has existed in China and Japan for centuries, as just one example.

[ii] F.L. Carlson. The Rise of Fascism. University of California Press, 1967. Third edition. p.131-132.