Well-Made World 24

In a letter to the president of the Oxford Union, Israeli filmmaker Ronen Berelovich laments Oxford's decision to uninvite Norman Finkelstein from a panel discussion on the one-state solution in Israel/Palestine. This is a shameful display of academic intolerance that is more suited to the United States, where Finkelstein has already experienced enough undue ideological censure; accordingly, the three other academics who were slated to represent Finkelstein's side of the debate (the one-state, as opposed to two-state, side)--Ghada Karmi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe--have withdrawn from the debate. Karmi's recent article for Comment is Free details the circumstances surrounding their withdrawal, as well as what she sees as the importation of the notorious Israel lobby of American onto British soil.

And thanks to John for bringing this article from The Nation to our attention: an account of the political climate regarding Israel/Palestine at Columbia University that almost has us at No Empires wishing we were back home...

Well-Made World 23

Today, one-half of No Empires attended a lecture by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities in London. We normally reserve little sympathy for Zizek's popular obtuseness--not to mention his deplorable rock star-cum-intellectual demeanor--but he remains a powerful and intellectually responsible force of the Left. We bring to you Zizek's piece from today's Guardian, which gives, in crystallized form, the basis of today's lecture. Zizek in person, incidentally, is sloppy as fuck, and given to any number of distracting nervous tics.

Tariq Ali weighs in on the bloodshed that awaited Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan, pointing out not only the vanity that characterized her 'show of strength' in the streets of Karachi, but also the outstanding charges of corruption against her which may yet find her serving time behind bars, to the hypocritical pleasure of the Musharraf government and its demand for "justice."

In an incredible interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, the recent Nobel-prize recipient Doris Lessing called out Americans for failing to view 9-11 in the context of the "terrible" actions of the IRA in England. After making this somewhat far-fetched comparison (and without making allowances for the differences between sustained colonial resistance that, as this article from the Guardian points out, resulted in the deaths of more than 3,700 people over thirty years, as opposed to terrorist acts that killed almost 3,000 people in one day), Lessing went on to praise Lee Bollinger's treatment of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling it "marvelous!" Uh, well done, Doris.

Well-Made World 22

Quote of the day--

"I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me, because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell."
--Former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto on the prospect of violence directed toward her upon her return to Pakistan following eight years of exile. And yet, this, from the AP, about fifteen minutes ago.

We're doing our best to keep on top of developments in Pakistan--an as-of-yet official presidential election; Bhutto's return; continuing anti-Nato violence across Waziristan. For the moment, we respectfully defer to Aijaz Ahmad, and this two-part video interview from the Real News website, one of our favorite sites recently, where Aijaz is a senior news analyst.

Also, congratulations to new grandfather and fellow-traveler of No Empires, John Loose (see above!), as well as to Manya and Mark.

Works Consulted #6

• Harriot Jacobs, Incidents in the Live of a Slave Girl (1859; found in in The Classic Slave Narratives, Signet 1987)
• Henry James, In The Cage (1898), in Selected Tales, (ed. John Lyon, Penguin 2001)
• Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (speech at Yale, 1989)
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), in The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (ed. T.J. Lustig, Oxford 1992)
• Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time" (1979)
• Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell 1990)
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794; Penguin 1988)
• Ghada Karmi, talk at Bookmarks store in London; Married To Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Books 2007)
• William Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799; Penguin 1988)
• Gyorgy Lukacs, The Historical Novel (1937; Merlin 1962)
• Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Verso 1990)
• Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Univ. of California Press, 1982)
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Belknap 2005)
• Elizabeth Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford 2004)

Legitimizing land grabs

Apparently, after two recent meetings with PM Ehud Olmert, Abu Mazen has perfected the duplicitious and prevaricating language of Israeli diplomacy. In what would initially seem the toughest language to come out of "official" Palestine since this summer's coup, Abbas claims to be after no less than all territory illegally annexed by Israel in June 1967, some 2,400 square miles, or 22% of historic Palestine. He notes, however (and this is where it gets tricky), that "[to] a border adjustment, on the basis of the same quality and the same amount, we have no objections." In other words, word from Ramallah to the rest of Occupied Palestine: let's be ready for a land swap! Abbas did not deem it fit to speak of the Separation Wall, the right of return, or any other final-status issue.

This comes on a day of wide reporting of Israel's intent to annex four Palestinian villages in the West Bank, for the purpose of expanding Israeli settlements. Israeli army says that the illegal confiscation will result in a "Palestinians-only" road from East Jerusalem to Jericho. Lovely. A road that will be largely unusable/inaccessible to the majority of Palestinians near it, all to connect the discontinuous Palestinian cantons found in the 23 miles from Jerusalem to Jericho.

'Pillars of society, pimping for torture'--Perry Anderson on the European Union

In a recent piece for the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson refutes the somewhat pathetic but surprisingly common (at least for Western neo-liberals, that is) notion that Europe will prove itself to be the world’s exemplar of freedom and stability for the twenty-first century (or, as it is alternately known in the minds of its champions, the "New European Century," a terminology frightening in its resemblance to its now-defunct American counterpart). Citing an unprecedented degree of 'political vanity' across the EU, Anderson seeks to clarify what ten years ago were 'three great imponderables': a single European currency, intended to bolster investment and productivity across (Western) Europe; Germany's reemergence, following reunification, as one of the two most powerful countries in Europe; and eastward expansion of the EU. The results, according to Anderson, are at best decidedly mixed, and certainly do not merit the talk of a European 'renaissance' that has been much publicized.

Tracking Europe's evolution over the last two decades, Anderson separates European myth--a Union of 'peace, prosperity, and democracy' (in the words of Mark Leonard)--from European reality--plain old free-market liberalism and privitisation of everything under the sun. The myth, which rests on a vague, always negative conception of Europe as “not America,” is betrayed, Anderson shows, by the EU’s betrayal of social democratic principles (not to mention Eastern Europe), as well as the Union’s increasingly slavish relationship to the US and its imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan--and possibly, in the coming months, Iran. Furthermore, the EU has yet to strike out a path independent of the United States regarding their mutual client state, Israel, and its ongoing illegal occupation of historic Palestine. Anderson points in particular to how the Union's expansion eastward has been predicated on an unwillingness to grant Eastern European countries any sort of autonomy from the British/French/German triumvirate--this Eastern inclusion, furthermore, must go through a vetting process headed up by the UN and the United States, who are in charge of deeming several countries either fit (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic) or unfit (Turkey, thus far) for entry into the EU.

Anderson calls this an "asymmetrical symbiosis" between the EU and the US, which is ultimately in contradiction to any anticipated European hegemony in the 21st century. We don't wish to overburden our readers with a step-by-step analysis of Anderson's argument; we can only encourage you to take the time to read his supremely important article.

Terry Eagleton v. Martin Amis/Barack Obama is a fabricator and you must not vote for him.

Martin Amis has been given a position at the University of Manchester, teaching Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, whose influence Amis has boringly worn on his sleeve for two decades. Manchester also happens to be Terry Eagleton's employer. To add to this, Eagleton has taken the opportunity, in a new Preface to his classic Ideology: An Introduction (reprinted by Verso this year) to take Martin Amis to task for his unabashedly reactionary turn following September 11, as well as to point out that Amis the Younger seems to be inheriting the most xenophobic and idiotic traits that his father, Kingsley, ever exhibited.

We are of the mind that both Amises have written, between them, at least two good novels (chronologically, Lucky Jim and London Fields). Yet Amis the Younger's war-mongering turn in recent years is thoroughly inexcusable, not to mention patently racist. In a quote that could have been come straight from the mouth of Christopher Hitchens (who has also, as we're sure you're aware, gone off the deep end in the past decade), novelist Martin Amis offered this answer to a question about whether his creative writing courses would have a particular theme: "If all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be, "Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd." Yet Amis is fooling no one. An apt slogan for the corruption of critical thinking, this quotation could be the motto of a particularly unpalatable contrarian attitude by which the likes of Amis and Hitchens justify their newfound reactionary sensibilities in the wake of 9-11. If Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis do end up in a hallway scuffle at the University of Manchester, we at No Empires know which of the two we'll be rooting for.

Echoing the first-ever No Empires post, No Empires still hates Barack Obama. We'll leave you with an excerpt from an article by Paul Street on America's most accessible black man; yet also its most dangerous, as he seems willing to ignore the entire miserable history of white supremacism and the black experience in America:

In Selma, Alabama last March, Obama claimed that the Civil Rights Movement's heroic struggles in Selma (site of a famous 1965 voting rights march) and Birmingham (home to an epic 1963 desegregation battle) sent out ripples of socially progressive change that permitted his black father (Barack Obama, Sr.) and white mother to "get together" and conceive "Barack Obama Jr." Behold the following incredible passage from Obama's speech at the fabled black church Brown Chapel in Selma:

"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "Ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children. When men who had PhD's decided that's enough and we're going to stand up for our dignity."

"That sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance."

"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals set forth in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is."

"This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me."

Too bad Obama was born four years before the Selma struggle in the relatively multicultural island state of Hawaii, where there was nothing all that shocking about a white woman marrying a graduate student from Kenya!

I cannot explain the line about "men who had Ph.D's.