I was still using a notebook then. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had not yet pronounced foreign correspondents "evil" agents, thus granting heavenly sanction to their manhandling, expulsion, or arrest, which duly followed. Like everyone that morning I was perplexed. The Iranian government proceeds with cautious calculation. The revolution's survival has not been based on caprice. Had this government really invited hundreds of journalists to a freedom fest only to change its mind? I lingered when I could, ran when I had to, bumping into another railing young woman in tears. As we stood talking, a middle-aged man approached. "Don't cry, be brave and be ready," he told her.
I will call him Mohsen. He showed me his ID card from the Interior Ministry, where he said he'd worked for thirty years. He'd been locked out, he said, as had other employees, many of whom had been fired in recent weeks. We ducked into a café, where patriotic songs droned from a TV over images of soldiers and devout women in black chadors—had we just witnessed an election or the imposition of martial law?—and Mohsen talked about his brother, a martyr of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, and how he himself had not fought in that war, nor endured a sibling's loss, to see "this injustice against the Revolution, conscience, and humanity."
Iran's dignity had been flouted, he said, the alleged election results emerging from the Interior Ministry plucked from the summer air. Why, I asked, had he admonished the young woman? "Because the best decisions are needed in the worst of conditions and crying is not the answer." Mohsen told me he'd also admonished the police: "I asked them: if Ahmadinejad won, why is such oppression needed?"
LRB: Slavoj Žižek:...and what it portends for the future of democracy? (hint: Ahmadenijad = Berlusconi = Kung Fu PandaWhat all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’
Gdn: speaking of Berlusconi, buried treasure on sexploit tape
The Silvio Berlusconi tapes released this week have focused, not surprisingly, on lurid discussions of threesomes, condoms and staying power. But today Italy's prime minister was facing the bizarre possibility that the most explosive secret in the recordings was neither sexual nor financial, but archaeological...After noting that the lake is adorned by a fossilised whale, Berlusconi purportedly adds: "Underneath here, we found 30 Phoenician tombs from 300BC."
Back one day in 1966, at a house party in North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, two teenage boys asked the same girl to dance.
One boy lived on Old York Road, the other on McCabe Avenue.
The two fought, first inside, then on the street, and a feud began that turned two neighborhood groups into gangs that terrorized a collection of blighted blocks for more than three decades.
Street wars between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys would become legendary and deadly. Corner disputes turned into drug disputes, and battles with knives, fists and bats turned into fights with rifles, revolvers and automatic handguns.
Police now say the two gangs are all but gone, their victims memorialized in a park, their leaders eviscerated by the law and their own hands, and residents living in the old turf proclaim a new day...
The recent violence brought back memories to a man who grew up on Old York Road in the 1960s and was one of the boys who had asked the girl to dance. He's 56 now, an Air Force veteran and a college graduate with an accounting degree. He has two children and runs his own consulting business.
Back in the day, he was an original lieutenant for the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys. He asked that his name not be used because he still has relatives in Pen Lucy and they fear for their safety...
He chose the suburbs over the inner city, but about a decade ago he took his 10- and 12-year-old sons to a family gathering in the old neighborhood.
There, he saw some men he used to hang with, now in their 40s but still strung out on the corners, still trapped in the old game, one that had long passed them by with violence and heroin. One son looked up incredulously and said, "Dad, do you know these bad people?"
Stunned, the man looked down and answered: "They're not bad people. They're people who made bad choices."
As he thinks back at the violence that engulfed Pen Lucy, he's sorry about the fight over the girl - she rejected both suitors, but that didn't seem to matter to boys fighting for honor - and wonders if any of the members of the gangs even know why they started fighting.
He suspects that the pattern in Pen Lucy was and is repeated all over the city. A simple dispute escalates, turns to drugs and guns, then jail and death.
Slate: race, racism, the law, and policing in the US
I know Gates and find it very hard to imagine him engaged in "disorderly conduct." But many police officers demand more than orderly conduct; they demand submission and deference. Given the difficult and dangerous jobs they do, they usually deserve it. But it would be naive to imagine that there are no power-hungry bigots wearing the uniform. Anyone, particularly a black person, needs only to encounter one such rogue officer to find himself in serious jeopardy—at that point a few hours in custody is about the best one can hope for. Maybe Gates, who is well-acquainted with the history of American racism, raised his voice in anger or fear. Maybe he even unfairly berated Crowley. But there's no way that the slight, 58-year-old Harvard scholar, with his cane, posed a threat to public order that justified his arrest.
Rather than improve those neighborhoods and help the people who live in them join the prosperous mainstream, we as a society have given police the dirty job of quarantining them. Frankly, we should expect that a disproportionate number of power-hungry bigots would find such a mandate attractive. And an otherwise decent and fair-minded officer, faced with the day-to-day task of controlling society's most isolated, desperate, and angry population, might develop some ugly racial generalizations and carry them even to plush and leafy neighborhoods such as those surrounding Harvard Yard. Yet when the inevitable racial scandal surfaces we, like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, are shocked, shocked to find racial bias in law enforcement and quick to blame individual police officers, rather than ourselves.
HuffPo: Brandon Terry: 'disorderly conduct' and vicious cycles
But if we can step back and see how easily this happened to someone like Gates, arguably the most famous academic in the country, it should encourage us to be more vigilant about the toll that continuing racial disparities in law enforcement are taking on blacks, particularly the working class and poor, in America. The disproportionate policing of amorphous criminal statutes like "disorderly conduct" and "disobeying the lawful order of a police officer" have served to introduce thousands of otherwise law-abiding people into the criminal justice system. This puts undue stress and costs on police forces and communities, undermining the capacity to stem crime at its roots. When applied to juveniles in particular, this type of policing only stigmatizes and alienates youth, exposing them further to deleterious influences that ultimately encourage them to turn away from school and legitimate employment.
NYT: Chavez's nepotism in Barinas; kidnappings skyrocket
Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy...
The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family...
“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.
One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects...More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.
Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.Gdn: Rio's gangs treat members in makeshit medical clinics, to avoid hospitals and arrest
SWJ: SV defers to this extensive round-up on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, and Honduras
Wired: Twitter, Google, YouTube execs deploy to Iraq
Cohen is a former Condoleezza Rice protégé now thriving under Hillary Clinton. Between puffs of flavored tobacco smoke drawn from a hookah, he explains that using technology to spread democracy has become a cornerstone of what diplo-nerds are calling 21st-century statecraft. Cohen chose this group for several reasons: to expose them to the changed reality of Iraq so they could spread the word back home, to inspire Iraqis to pursue capitalism with the fervor of a tech startup, and to initiate a few projects that will actually help Iraq rebuild. David Nassar, a VP at Blue State Digital—which handled online aspects of Barack Obama's campaign—is along to offer ideas on elections. Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice president of Automattic (the company behind WordPress), is an advocate for blogging and the open source movement. Richard Robbins, AT&T's "director of social innovation" (a title he invented), represents the big mobile firms. And there are three people from Google (including YouTube's Walk) because—well, because it's Google.
Cohen's fear is that taking a bunch of Web 2.0 suits into a nation shattered by war will be seen as an absurd boondoggle, mocked in the press as war tourism for Twittering geeks. The way to counter this, he says, is to produce "deliverables." In Cohen's personal word cloud, that's a noun set in 36-point type. "The technology that's second nature to you is going to be really important to countries like this," he tells the group. "You have a chance to contribute to this country in this early form of nation-building."
On one hand, it's ludicrous. What can makers of social networks and video sites do to fix an economy that's as broken as Saddam's statue? On the other hand, Silicon Valley types like to think they know how to make the world better. This trip isn't about profits or investing opportunities—as new markets go, Iraq falls somewhere between Antarctica and Somalia in desirability. They're motivated by a mix of curiosity and Obama-inspired patriotism. (If George Bush were still president, some of them might not have come.) There is also the guilt factor. "It's the least we can do for fucking up their country," Heiferman says.
Just how fucked up is Iraq? The executives get an overview in a series of briefings from State Department and military officials in embassy meeting rooms. Not all bad. Just mostly bad. Violence is down, but danger still lurks outside the Green Zone. The economy is a wreck. Electricity comes and goes.
"This is an analog society," says an Army major charged with expanding the communications infrastructure.LAT: American Al-Qaeda recruit turns informant
His account highlights Al Qaeda's penchant for bureaucracy: personnel files, applications and evaluations. Over four months, Vinas took three courses from an Arab instructor, alongside 10 to 20 students. The curriculum encompassed the use of firearms such as the AK-47 rifle; explosives theory and the assembly of bombs and suicide vests; and the use of rocket-type weapons.
NYRB: Hochschild on the historical continuity of rape and enslavement in the Congo
WP: Aung San Suu Kyi could face 5 more years of detention because American broke into her property
Suu Kyi was charged in May after a U.S. citizen from Falcon, Mo., eluded the tight security surrounding the villa where she was detained in Rangoon by swimming across a lake to the house...
They say that despite 13 years of house arrest -- imposed by the military junta that rules Burma after Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won an overwhelming electoral victory in 1990 -- she remains the government's most formidable opponent.
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NPR: (one of) Escobar's legacies: a theme park and hippos
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