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!

Comments

[chabert]

well, you just keep on doing the hard work of running this blog, protecting it from hostile comments, and watching battlestar gallactica, you two. Maybe one day after you accomplish this glorious overthrow of nation states, you can raise two hundred dollars each to sent anthony to school. The rest of us are depending on you.

[s0metim3s]

What are you talking about Chabert? Who is Anthony, and what does sending him to school have to do with your claim that nation-states are eternal ... etc?

Are you saying that nation-states are important, so that you can speculate on currency differentials in order to have an income with which to send Anthony to school so that he doesn't spend his time watching scifi but, instead, learns to appreciate higher cultural forms such as opera? (And what does any of that have to do with the war, rather than your ego?)

[chabert]

Angela. You're perfectly ridiculous. There are twenty of you between the weblog and long sunday and you can't solve the small problem of Anthony's school money? And you are going to take on the NSA? That is after you crush Hezbollah with your withering expressions of distaste and wipe out Lavalas by the repeated typing of the curse populist in inverted commas? You are an ignorant, self-important clown.

Good luck with your "hard work".

[chabert]

As for ego, I am not the one pretending to educate the Iraqi resistance in what is good for them. I assume they and the Lebanese resistance know better than I and can make those decisions about which sovereignty they prefer without my advice and correction. As for my claiming nation states are eternal, that's a very bad straw man. They were here before I was born; they are here now; I don't think you can make them go away doing what you do; I invite, encourage, and indeed implore you to prove me wrong. If there is something I can do to assist, do say.

When you have succeeded, let me know.

[hollowentry]

"I assume they and the Lebanese resistance know better than I and can make those decisions about which sovereignty they prefer without my advice and correction."

EXACTLY.

I bring up Taiaiake Alfred's work not to show that it's possible that there is a 'good' anticolonial militant struggling in the poststructural way as opposed to the 'evil' militant struggling in the outre hegemonic way, only that anticolonial struggles are not reducible to a particular tactic. However, it's privileged and misguided to only support liberation movements when they LOOK cool (what do you think you see?). I'm sure Matt would be the first to condemn Hamas too along with Hezbollah--but what about the Islamist women in Hamas struggling for self-determination of Palestine, while also organizing within Hamas, and within an Islamic framework, to militate for women--on this see Rabab Abdulhadi's work on feminism in palestinian resistance movements. Let’s be concrete about conditions in occupied territories, and clear about the stakes. The short answer is, it's none of our goddamn business how Palestinians are going to organize themselves, but they have and will struggle for their liberation, and they don’t need my management skills. But what is our business is the fact that we are within states that are funding the brutal occupation of Palsetine, we are members of an academia that has been complicit, indeed a necessary lynchpin, of imperiaslim. Our silence is complicity.

I mentioned on berube’s blog that the French resistance was comprised of leftists but also antisemitic ultra-conservatives. Imagine to whose use it would be to condemn this resistance, its violence. What mediatic spectacle is it to announce that I will not participate in supporting such a despicable resistance—and then on the grounds that this would be a mediatic spectacle!

The point was to let French people figure this shit out without most of the country crawling with the occupiers—incidentally, lots of people expected a civil war in France after the Germans pulled out—arthur koestler even discusssed the nazi occupation as an interregnum between a continuum of French sectarian politics and violence. Plus ca change.

But we are in states that are the occupiers, whether directly or by proxy. Waiting for reform of the very instittuions of colonialism—our government, our state, is a useful fantasy. It was Vietnamese nationalists who expelled the Americans—with welcome support from people in the us and throughout the world, icky goofy annoying people who don’t all read the latest theory. It is people in so-called ‘developing’ states struggling for their own liberations in many ways who are expressing solidarity with humanity—it is ‘we’ (privileged academic-type bloggers) who are not, certainly when we think it would be yucky to be seen around lebanese people carrying signs of resistance THEY CHOOSE on marches. So fucking elitist. There were americans in marches during the vietnam war who did so for various reasons. But people came together in a march in solidarity against imperialism. These actions were not inconsequential—or are you arguing protest is just meaningless spectacle, as opposed to your profound and pure and appropriately theorized actions of condemning both sides. But then for Matt, best not to participate and hope that history works everything out without any human involvement?

Angela: what do you suggest? Quietism?

[hollowentry]

oops "Our silence is complicity" should read "our equivocation is complicity"

[s0metim3s]

Re: Chabert's remarks - I can't say I'm bothered by some rather hypocritical abuse from capitalists, no matter how indignantly put. Nor do I feel persuaded of the benefits of nation-states from someone who makes an income speculating on the currency differentials between them.

As for this 'nation-states were around before I was born' thing ... Say what? It doesn't follow that one has to confer legitimacy upon nation-states - any more than one is obliged to defer to sexism because it, too, has been 'around for a long time'.

the Lebanese resistance know better than I and can make those decisions about which sovereignty they prefer

A tautology. Unless 'the Lebanese resistance' is a euphemism for Hizbollah, in which case, you have already made the decision - one which not everyone in Lebanon seems to support.

Hollowentry - Well, I'm sure there are complexities which no amount of comments will cover, but perhaps we can run through some. I don't beleive there are univocal entities called Palestinians, Lebanese, and so on. It requires some distance, and a pretty strong committment to nationalism - over and above any of the manifold cleavages, including those of class and so on - to imagine this is so.

And, please speak for yourself: I'm not a member of academia. Which is also to say, it requires some degree of identification as priveliged, white, and so on for this moralistic, depoliticising injunction - that one must not 'judge' what 'the less priveliged do' - to work.

But, judge you do, in fact. And it remains for you to take responsibility for these judgements - who you support, who you don't, and so on - rather than claim you are simply deferring to the wishes of a fictively unitary entity called 'the Lebanese' or 'the Palestinians'.

[hollowentry]

“I don't beleive there are univocal entities called Palestinians, Lebanese, and so on. It requires some distance, and a pretty strong committment to nationalism - over and above any of the manifold cleavages, including those of class and so on - to imagine this is so.”
Why is class then not imaginary and fictive? Why is gender? These are not univocal either. For me, it’s because it is produced, in the case of working class people for example, in the circumstances of their material concrete relationships to each other, against their collective oppression.

“rather than claim you are simply deferring to the wishes of a fictively unitary entity called 'the Lebanese' or 'the Palestinians'.”

‘Palestinians’—the quotation marks around palestinian is troubling. Are Palestinians who agitate for Palestinian human rights acting in bad faith? For not putting palestinian in quotations? What about human? I’m sure I’m not getting this, but this seems to be a poststructural specter of humanism—devoid of much of its content, but recuperating its universalist and metaphysical assumptions.

I believe an historical and material analysis is necessary to understand how we live, in different social formations, including occupied Palestine—but I’ll play along (easy for me to do) for the moment that everything you and I know prior to the last week is a conspiracy. At this moment, right now, this past week, there are people who recognize their solidarity and identity through their personal circumstances and relationships—varied, conflicting, complex—but sharing in a brutal, unrelenting oppression by the fact they are Palestinians (and not ‘Palestinians’). Even ignoring—in a most metaphysical and dehumanizing way—the reality of longer historical circumstances, shared traditions and practices) it is the shared refusal against collective systems of oppressions AS Palestinians, through which people overflow these colonial boundaries, and constitute themselves in a myriad of ways—but collectively against the material conditions of their oppression—together as Palstinians. Their identification is no more fictive than any other creative “lines of flight”. Certainly less so than colonialists like Camus who imagined a working class solidarity among settlers and algerians where there was none, because of the real systemic privilege settlers were not only unwilling to challenge, but relied on for their own identities they imagined to be universal. This refusal to recognize that there is a struggle for national liberation by Palestinians for Palestinians, produced in the existing circumstances of systems of oppression, their “quarantine”, seems to recuperate a universal humanism without any need for action.

You don’t need to answer my question about what you suggest people living in states like Australia or Canada, complicit in the oppression of Palestinians, or Lebanese ‘people’ (or if you prefer, individual humans who are being bombed becasue they are palestinian, lebanese) might do, but I would like to know. I’ve read some of your stuff and you have profound and true ideas about some things, what about this?

“And, please speak for yourself: I'm not a member of academia. Which is also to say, it requires some degree of identification as priveliged, white, and so on for this moralistic, depoliticising injunction - that one must not 'judge' what 'the less priveliged do' - to work. “

Totally cool, my bad. you aren’t an academic, but you are an extremely prolific and well-published poststructural theoretician in many pomo journals—I’ve read a few of your essays. I don’t mean that as an accusation. For myself, I don’t identify as white with my causasian brethren, I RECOGNIZE I am white and privileged in relation to other folks, for instance in a blogging conversation, where as a man I don’t get called hysterical. I don’t need to vocally identify as white when I walk into a bar, walk through certain neighbourhoods, I am white and the racist constitutions of settler society means that I will be treated, and engage this reality, in a profoundly different way compared to someone indigenous or black. I don’t identify with my male brothers about our needs for man power and protecting our vital fluids, I recognize that I am a (occasionaly ridiculous, sputtering, goofy) man. Why stop at the circumstances of oppression that produce particular needs for national solidarity? What about men? working class people?

[hollowentry]

that's gotta be misogyny: "what about men" should read "what about women"

Comment deleted. As will all subsequent from Chabert on this thread. Frankly, it's just dull.

[hollowentry]

I didn't want to believe that sometimes was really being racist when she wrote:

"fictively unitary entity called 'the Lebanese' or 'the Palestinians'."

and I wanted to wait for her to clarify what she said, but this seems a perfectly clear example. Why do "Palestinians" and "Lebanese" get scare quotes but not other people? But instead of deleting oppressive language, you deleted Chabert's comments for being dull. Despicable. I feel disgusting even being on this blog. I'm sure you're unlikely to shed a tear, but I have no interest in ever writing here again.

Are you going to erase this too for drawing attention to oppressive language?

[GodsPartyofLenin]

I must say, the co-timely end of Bérubé's thread, around number 67, say, is really quite funny.

[CR]

Earnest question: if the only job Americans have vis a vis Iraq is to tell our government "Out now" - and that might well be right - what is it that we should do vis a vis Lebanon?

One problem with this discussion is that it seems to start with the issue of "endorsing" Hezbollah, only to turn away from that issue and toward Iraq without circling completely back. Which may well be purposeful. And everything, for most of us, may end up in an increasingly nuanced discussion of how to yell at our tv. Or some sort of post-World Cup filling out of a tournment bracket, our picks. But it seems to me something worth hashing out, as we are - sort of, to a certain degree - on here...

Reading some of the arguments advanced in the course of this multi-blog debate, we might well gain an insight into what we might most valuably do in regards to Iraq, but this insight might leave us at loose ends when it comes to Israel - perhaps there's nothing at all to be done but watch in horror.

[Charles]

Um, yeah. Or we could make the Bush/Blair junta make Israel stop it. (Nobody else seems able to apparently.)

hollowentry, are you joking?

"Whnat we need to do whnat whnat is to get Cheney.. is to get Isreal to just stop doing this shit...whnat whnat."

Maxspeak

[Charles]

Killing time meanwhile, sounds a more alarmist note.

[s0metim3s]

The stuff about God's Party of Lenin is pretty funny. Hollowentry's most recent remark, not so much, or in a different way.

It's a bizarre turn of the conversation when the suggestion that not all Lebanese or all Palestinians think the same way - eg, THE Lebanese support Hizbollah - is decried as racist. Apparently, the only proper anti-racist approach, according to Hollowentry, is to ascribe a homogeneity to the otherly-complexioned, decide both what the the attributes (support for Hizbollah) and form (national) of this homogeneity are - and explain it as the benevolent gesture of the 'more priveliged'. Please.

And I don't think you'll find here support for suggestions that 'THE Australians' or 'THE Americans' support Howard, Bush, or whatever local political outfits. In part because the transcendental, mystical categories of a univocal national identity that anglo-american left-wing nationalists peddle so as to lend credence to their politics, would, if they were directed at 'us', be simply laughed at.

As for "the circumstances of oppression that produce particular needs for national solidarity" - the logic of this is precisely what Israel uses so as to justify its war of 'self-defense'. In other words: Hollowentry, like other left-wing nationalists, picks and chooses which politics to support, despite the benevolent rhetoric of 'leaving it to others to decide for themselves'. And the only form of 'self' that they support, ultimately, is nationalism. Tautologies parading as analysis.

[CR]

Can I just register that I'm not very happy with this thread. I'll just leave it at that.

Magnificently unhelpful, I think.

[s0metim3s]

For those who haven't already seen, or who haven't noted the time change: Mrabba Electronique (otherwise called the webjam) is on today, from 2 to 6 pm GMT.

http://recordingsurface.blogsome.com/2006/08/11/opportunities/

[Matt]

One final link...in the form of a fantastic post by different maps: We are Not Hezbullah.

I agree with all of it.

[Matt]

Oh, and how perfectly canting of you, CR. Really.

[WareNannie25]

Don't you recognize that it is the best time to receive the business loans, which can make your dreams come true.