« In need of heroic readers (more than heroes) | Main | An upward-looking blognod »
Letters from Beirut
s0metim3s links to this video, from July 21 in comments, but it might as well be elevated to a post.
Update 8/8/06: And Michael Bérubé has a post some of our more "radical" leftist friends may wish to consider reading.
Update 8/09/06: And another, continuing a patient series on Noam Chomsky. Update: And another!
By Matt | August 2, 2006 in Israel/Palestine | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/361357/5573929
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Letters from Beirut:
Comments
A bit of info, from the website it's taken from:
This video letter was made on July 21, 2006 at the studios of Beirut DC, a film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya Film Festival. This video letter was produced in collaboration with Samidoun, a grassroots gathering of various organizations and individuals who were involved in relief and media efforts from the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It was also broadcasted at the Biennial of Arab Cinema, organized by the Arab World Institute in Paris.
It's a huge file, but there should be more formats of the film available shortly - or so I gather. And well worth watching.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Aug 3, 2006 3:59:32 AM
hello friends at LongSunday_ I've added this linkt to our group as per above. as always Long Sunday is a learning experience.
Posted by: clifford duffy | Aug 4, 2006 3:07:30 PM
Posted by: | Aug 5, 2006 7:32:04 PM
http://beirut.dischosting.nl/
http://streamtime.org//index.php?blogId=1
Posted by: s0metim3s | Aug 6, 2006 12:52:40 AM
An incredible read...
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060801170800738
Posted by: wltzblckr | Aug 6, 2006 5:53:42 AM
Israel is creating an Islamic Lebanon
Posted by: | Aug 6, 2006 12:50:11 PM
Posted by: | Aug 6, 2006 1:11:25 PM
Thanks wltzblckr.
Juan Cole entertains a "conspiracy theory" here
Posted by: Matt | Aug 6, 2006 3:19:03 PM
A flickr-set on protests inside Israel http://www.flickr.com/photos/activestills
(via)
Posted by: s0metim3s | Aug 8, 2006 12:23:24 PM
I can't believe you're puffing that shit from Berube.
If the US troops have no place in Iraq, as he accepts, how are they to be evicted without the activities of both armed and unarmed resistance? Why should support for resistance to a brutal occupation responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths be dependent upon their living up to the ego-ideal of American liberalism? Since when was it heterodox for the left to support anti-imperialist movements that were both religious and nationalist, whose politics could be reactionary?
If anyone is concerned about womens' rights and gay rights in Iraq, then the first question to ask is whether the occupation is hindering or harming those. Since it is the latter, since it is the pro-US SCIRI-affiliated Badr Corps that are said to be attacking gays in Iraq for instance, the next question is where is the force capable of dislodging the occupation and therefore removing the political power of the SCIRI? If not in the nationalist resistance, where else? Is there a revolutionary socialist current in Iraq to speak of? The best chance for gays and women in Iraq is the victory of the resistance, and the only way that can come about is if the resistance finds a united political structure to represent it that is non-sectarian, and that guarantees rights for Iraqis (including economic rights) that the occupiers cannot, will not, and do not wish to provide.
Posted by: lenin | Aug 8, 2006 3:00:52 PM
Please believe it, I agree with him.
This is not to vilify Hezbollah (or the good things they have done), either. There is a difference betweeen yesterday's liberation theology of the Sandinistas, say, and fundamentalist Islam. To mechanically side with any military force simply because they are "anti-Imperialist" or "the real victim" is absurd and irresponsible, and merely repeats the logic by which such aggressions are forever justified. Such cookie-cutter politics lend themselves to scoring a lot of immediately gratifying rhetorical points, which I'm sure are satisfying to those in preemptive permanent revolution mode, but in the end they present a false and uninspiring choice.
Leaving Freud's involvement aside for the moment, if the result you want is truly effective and economic rights, and a full withdrawal of US military presence, then all necessary caveats aside, I see no reason why American liberalism as such necessarily precludes this. Troops can be withdrawn. International (and not just national) forces can be brought to bear.
You're either with the resistance or you're an Imperialist, is that it? And a pointless, pious vote for Nader in between? Heterodox is far too gentle a word.
Posted by: Matt | Aug 8, 2006 4:46:11 PM
There is a difference betweeen yesterday's liberation theology of the Sandinistas, say, and fundamentalist Islam.
"Fundamentalist Islam". You wouldn't know a phrase like that if some dickhead hadn't spoon-fed it to you. Has an independent thought ever rolled across that vast, tumbleweed strewn prairie of a mind of yours? There is Political Islam of various kinds and creeds. Some of it is reactionary, some conservative, some liberal, some leftist. Some of it is sectarian, some not. Some of it has mixed politics. Hassan Hanafi is an Islamist, but you would be hard-pressed to call him a devotee of 'fundamentalist Islam'. Ditto Tariq Ramadan. 'Fundamentalism' is an entirely inappropriate term here, imported as it is from a Protestant tradition of literal interpretation. (And even the salafists are not as extreme in their literalism as the Christian fundamentalists.) You could find that out with a few minutes of research. Good grief, think you inept fanny-pad of a man, think!
You're either with the resistance or you're an Imperialist, is that it?
No, you're either with the resistance or with the imperialists or you have an alternative. Your 'alternative' is International imperialism (your strenuous capitalisation of the abstract, not mine).
Anyone with half an education could guess that international forces would have no more luck in Iraq today than they did in Lebanon in the 1980s. Aside from the fact that no one is going to send troops, and no one wants to, the US is not going to allow it to happen except on terms that would enable it to continue to dominate the political process in Iraq. And if the US succeeded in persuading some perfect saps to send their army into Iraq that haven't already done so, then you can be sure they would be leaving soon. You are proposing to remedy a concrete problem with an abstraction - not the least flaw of American liberalism as it happens.
Incidentally, I didn't mention Nader, but if you think a vote for Nader would be "pious", I wonder how one - as a leftist - persuades oneself let alone anyone else to vote for the chosen right-wing Democrat. "He's against Bush, so he must be good. You're either with Kerry or with Bush." What was that about cookie-cutter politics? Something mumbled about sterile dichotomies, perhaps? Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps what you actually mean is: "Kerry may be against everything I stand for, but at least he ain't no damned Muslim fundamentawhatchacallit."
Your support for the Democrats comes down to slave morality. You expect some pea-brained political ambulance-chaser to provide a breathing space from the onslaught of the Bush administration, naively supposing that the Democrats aren't in fact wholly signed up to the programme or at least that a large vote for them would somehow register with the political class and the ruling class they represent, instead of organising independently and exerting power. As you mention Freud, your refusal of that alternative has its own psychic economy which implicates you more directly than your half-hearted defense of International imperialism does me.
Posted by: lenin | Aug 8, 2006 5:33:46 PM
Has an independent thought ever rolled across that vast, tumbleweed strewn prairie of a mind of yours?
Dude. I live in Vermont. Green hills, and waterfalls.
hmmm...you know, it's a little hard to take you seriously, lenin. Speaking of "ego-ideals," so glibly. But I really have neither the heart nor the time to engage in this debate with you further, or for that matter to scour the dictionary for creative insults. In America, when someone goes off the handle or is otherwise ridiculously rude, or maybe just plain ridiculous, we tend to say, or think, if anything: "fuuuck you," and leave it at that. I wouldn't say that to you, because I don't feel particularly addressed by your comments. So it's more like a shrug. And in truth your site is often a valuable source of alternative news, which is certainly appreciated. You do seem to have a fixed image of your opponent in mind at all times that fuctions as a sort of motivational, hyperbolic force, and I can't say I wish it particularly well, at least in this case. I do think that you (and SWP generally) do an immense disservice to any productive, enduring alternative whatsoever, as far as I can tell. But again this response may be, in part, the result of living in the current US (as opposed to British) political climate, with all that that entails (speaking of Bérubé's post, to which you have yet to respond with any degree of honest comprehension).
Of course there is a wide variety of groups within political or militant Islam, and many of them do not agree, are dynamic, are sometimes divided by ethnic lines, and often holding each other in deep suspicion despite various degrees of realpolitik cooperation. That was hardly my point, you'll notice. My point was simply that one must choose one's expressions of solidarity–and more than this how to give precise meaning to them–each time.
Since you feel free to impute my notions, and are apparently so opposed to such things as the strengthening of international law and the creation of new institutions not bounded in their concept or vision by national boundaries (not a "half-hearted" concern of mine, by any means), what, I feel rather justified in wondering, is *your* alternative (to an abstract "International imperialism" as you put it)?
Btw, now that you mention such things, I did enjoy this show the other night.
Posted by: Matt | Aug 8, 2006 6:15:32 PM
Oh, and to respond to "all the usual garbage...about how I’m a corporate imperialist running dog DLC operative..."
...you know what, forget it, nevermind. We've been over that before (Nader, that is. And the funny thing is, I even voted for the guy, three times, I think.)
Posted by: Matt | Aug 8, 2006 6:36:04 PM
speaking of "supporting" "anti-Imperialist" "movements:"
...very little of the Iraqi insurgency seems to qualify as “anti-imperialist” in any clear sense. Second problem: who is Roy expressing solidarity with? Former Baathists? Sunnis afraid they’re be crushed by Shi’ites? Shi’ites blowing up Sunnis in retaliation? Shi’ites blowing each other up? The small group of foreign fighters who are going into Iraq on ‘80s mujahadeed nostalgia trips? It would sort of be like saying that one expressed “solidarity” with *all* the factions in the Lebanese Civil War after the marine barracks bombing.
Posted by: Naoko | Aug 8, 2006 6:51:09 PM
“...problem: who is Roy expressing solidarity with? Former Baathists? Sunnis afraid they’re be crushed by Shi’ites? Shi’ites blowing up Sunnis in retaliation? Shi’ites blowing each other up? The small group of foreign fighters who are going into Iraq on ‘80s mujahadeed nostalgia trips? It would sort of be like saying that one expressed “solidarity” with *all* the factions in the Lebanese Civil War after the marine barracks bombing.”
let’s not stop there, let’s apply this logic to anticolonial actions from the past too: who were French citizens like Simone de Beauvoir to express solidarity with in the insurrections against French hegemony in Algeria? Who to choose? Ahmed Dey’s insurrection in Constantine, Abdelkader’s insurrection centered in the Oranie at the moment of conquest? El Mokrani’s insurrection in the 1870s? Or during the 1950s war of independence, with the FLN that committed massacres, the MNA fighting the FLN as well as the French forces? With the Islamic Ulemas, the Communists?
oooh. complex. Best to condemn all sides eh? That sounds safe. I take it De Beauvoir should have shut up then? Was she just feeling ‘ressentiment’, as some of the multidudes(c) here like to talk about (whether used by Nietzsche or Ortage Y Gasset, that term is completely elitist)? Perhaps her writing on the institutionalized torture of Algerians was not going to solve anything? Should she have supported the leftist parties in the French asssemblee nationale that also approved sending troops to pacify the resitance and legislate notoriously crooked elections in Algeria (on the latter read Sylvie Thenault’s recent book on the war of independence).
Or perhaps she may have in fact been right in taking a stand against what she could and should: a brutal occupation made possible by her own state’s government, whether gaullist or socialist, that produced the immiseration, internment, and murders of millions of Algerian Muslims. Solidarity isn’t a shopping list about who you like, it is about working against the institutional regimes of imperialism, and expressing solidarity with the self-determination of the colonized and conquered. Liberal Algerian Mouloud Feraoun said about colonialists like Camus: you can’t sit between two chairs.
Posted by: hollowentry | Aug 8, 2006 8:03:47 PM
how funny (and predictable). hollow has already been pwned by Berube.
Posted by: | Aug 8, 2006 8:14:40 PM
What about Roland Barthes. Is using "ressentiment" to talk of love permissable? I ask only as a member of the multidude.
Posted by: Matt | Aug 8, 2006 8:32:04 PM
matt, I'm not trying to forbid anybody from using any words. But it seemed to me that the past contexts in which I have read you (and rich) using resentiment is over the issues of so-called anticolonial 'populism'. Why don't you explain to me how you use it?
Posted by: hollowentry | Aug 8, 2006 8:50:06 PM
hollowentry,
I use it differently in different contexts, but there's an earlier post around here somewhere that draws on Barthes.
btw, I'm glad to see you "agree," on Michael's blog, with this statement:
hollowentry: re. Iraq specifically, if solidarity means calling for a total and immediate pull out of U.S. troops, then I’m with you 100%.If solidarity means something beyond that, in this case, I’m not clear what.
Expressing one’s liking or disliking of the Iraqi insurgents isn’t “complicated”, it’s basically a meaningless gesture. The only job those of us in the U.S. have is to tell our government “Out now.”
I really couldn't agree more.
Posted by: Matt | Aug 8, 2006 10:17:21 PM
I agree with that statement because it's none of my businesss by what means privileged people in North America and West Europe want to reach the conclusion that they are complicit in, and have the power to stop, oppression globally and in their daily lives--in this case by being 100% against military occupations by their states or by proxy--only that they do.
Posted by: hollowentry | Aug 8, 2006 11:46:17 PM
This notion that one must 'choose sides' (or at least those 'sides' one can read about in various headlines of the mainstream news) so as to be a 'player' in politics, as if politics is indeed reducible to or can be understood as a game of geopolitical chess, is pathetically insecure.
And, btw, this 'anti-imperialist' paradigm of 'occupation and exit strategy' is rubbish. It feeds off nostalgia for some Westphalian peace in the metropoles, with perpetual war consigned to the colonies - where those with, say, non-Lebanese passports can be ferried to safety - and it is already playing out in the form of Iraqi police and military assuming the role that the occupation has until now played.
One can play the game of which sovereignty is preferable, if that makes one feel important (or potentially) sovereign. ButI happen to think that game itself is the problem.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Aug 9, 2006 12:55:57 AM
sometimes are you responding to my comment? I could be wrong, but I take it you mean that anticolonial struggle is a struggle for sovereignty, while some people in Australia or North America look on and tsk tsk, while they revel in the peaceful life? I was referring to the specificity of imperialist states’ organization of perpetual war in so-called peripheries.You and I live in settler states. There are immediate issues here as well—also tied to imperialism and neoliberalism. The oppressions that constitute race, gender, sexuality and class in Canada or Australia manifests itself in a myriad of ways, provides some the supplementary passport of whiteness, masculinity, civility, etc.., and renders others abject--not just as an imaginary other, but through the techonologies of surveillance and control, for example. There are anticolonial struggles in Canada, and though I don't know enough to say much of anything, ones in Australia or New Zealand too. I think you are committing a falacy in thinking that anticolonial struggle is one about replacing sovereignty in the sense you impute. I am talking about challenging state’s hegemonies over dominated peoples, in the case of the states’ in which we are citizens, there is a complicity in not actively engaging against these regimes. I don’t desire anybody to ‘develop’ a particular sovereignty in replacement. Taiaiake Alfred notes this as being a particularaly Euroamerican strategy:
“The authentic Onkwehonwe reaction to this has been diverse in terms of defining the ideal relationship of the Onkwehonwe nation and the state (there are varying approaches to the practical implementation of the nation-to-nation concept that underlies all Onkwehonwe ideas of coexistence). But Onkwehonwe are united in their demand of the Settler state a recognition of cultural diversity, political autonomy, collective identities and rights, legal pluralism and indigenous forms of political representation. Yet they have run head-on into the fundamental reality of state sovereignty and the Euroamerican notion of power: control and monological thinking.
Onkwehonwe ideas and complex, pluralistic beliefs are too complicated and difficult, it seems, for simple-minded Settler institutions and the elites who control them, who reduce the world into categories of us-versus-them and right-versus-wrong. Aboriginalism, with its roots in this dichotomizing essentialism, plays the perfect foil to the Euroamerican mentality. Settlers can remain who and what they are, and injustice can be reconciled by the mere allowance of the Other to become one of Us. What higher reward or better future is there than to be finally recognized as achieving the status of a European?
Disentangling the elements of the Settler state from our lives any time soon seems out of the question for many of our people. But I wonder whether Onkwehonwe can even hope to survive without respect for our freedom and rights as nations of people? Think of the European definition of sovereignty, and try to imagine how any people could preserve themselves for long without possessing the elements of such a national existence: the power of and cultural capacity for self-definition; a singular or unitary identity; a shared belief in their independence and rights as a people; the capacity for self-defence; and land and a connection to the land that provides the bases for self-sufficiency and for an independent existence. Without all of these things, a people will not be long on this earth.
Yashar has surveyed the current situation facing indigenous peoples; considered the rising tide of dissatisfaction with aboriginalist-integrationist agendas pushed by aboriginalist politicians, as well as the expressed demands for recognition of national existences; and concluded that we need to come up with different and more complex political mappings that are capable of balancing the Euroamerican preoccupation with individual rights with Onkwehonwe’s diverse collective identities, forms of representation and evolving structures of governance. In doing so, she hits on the core obstacle to peaceful coexistence in this post-modern imperial age: the implicit homogeneity of neoliberalism.
Yet her progressive proposal is still framed within the state. This is its fatal flaw, reflecting the futility of all internalist approaches. The state itself is incapable of relating to other entities in a pluralistic and peaceful way. Acceptance of an Onkwehonwe existence within the colonial state, however creatively imagined, is a death sentence for that indigenous nation. The imperative of the state by design is homogenization and singular control by the monopoly of force and legitimacy. Without a fundamental remaking of the state itself, there is no chance to reform the relationship of the state to indigeno It is possible for Onkwehonwe to cut through the miseducation and colonial mythologies presented to us as truth. What is being Onkwehonwe? From what I’ve been told, and from what I’ve seen in all the time I’ve spent among Onkwehonwe all over the world, “being Onkwehonwe” is living heritage, being part of a tradition – shared stories, beliefs, ways of thinking, ways of moving about in the world, lived experiences – that generates identities which, while ever-changing and diverse, are deeply rooted in the common ground of our heritages as original peoples.
[...]
The great Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said understood being part of a culture as participation in an ongoing dynamic that revolves around people’s attempts to answer certain crucial questions about themselves in the public life of the community, questions such as how the central traditions of a people are held onto, what is considered as a tradition and how a people’s history is read. Like Said was of his own identity as a Palestinian, I am drawn to the idea of indigeneity as practice, a dynamic of reflection and dialogue; I’ve written in the past about the idea of a “self-conscious traditionalism.” My sense is that the notion of peoples’ interactions with their history is the foundation, but that a meaningful Onkwehonwe identity, one that is consistent with Onkwehonwe teachings, must go beyond reflective practices to an actual political and social engagement with the world based on consensus arrived at through broad conversation among people who are part of that culture.us peoples...
http://newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=850
Posted by: hollowentry | Aug 9, 2006 1:47:50 AM
sometimes are you responding to my comment? I could be wrong, but I take it you mean that anticolonial struggle is a struggle for sovereignty, while some people in Australia or North America look on and tsk tsk, while they revel in the peaceful life?
I was responding to cyberLenin's, or really, the SWP's fantasies of being geopolitical 'players'.
And no, I don't for a moment think that struggles against colonisation are always struggles for sovereignty.
Btw, there's an interview with Taiaiake Alfred on CTheory that might also be of interest. And, if you haven't already seen, Peter d'Errico on American Indian Sovereignty.
On the question of the Middle East, though, I don't believe that exit strategies - whose contours of subjectivity remain national in scope, the 'Bring OUR Troops Home' etc - will amount to an escape from this war, except for some with the relevant passports. And it's unfortunate that this talk of exit strategies is what dominates the (nominal) antiwar campaigns.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Aug 9, 2006 2:56:26 AM
No, withdrawal by itself is definitely not a recipe for "success"/immunity. Which is why genuine international cooperation and new institutions to actively fight for such ideally non-nationalist cooperation must be built. It's *hard work* (and I, for one, certainly wouldn't kid myself that something as mindless and cheaply opportunist as willfully conforming to the useful stereotype of the "angry leftist"–of which we have more than plenty in the US, in jokes like ANSWER and other such "solidarities"–or for that matter marching with a sign that vainly supports one murderous faction over another, however "self-defensive" in origin and otherwise humanitarian (if still Islamist), accomplishes any of it).
Posted by: Matt | Aug 9, 2006 10:48:12 AM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
