politics – Page 3 – Wis[s]e Words

Orientalism – Edward Said

Published on March 5, 2008

Cover of Orientalism

Orientalism
Edward Said
396 pages including index
published in 1978

There are some books that I’m sort of ashamed to review, not because the books themselves are so bad but just because I should’ve read them years ago. Orientalism is one such book. Both it and its author are so often namechecked by leftwing bloggers that I felt a slight twinge of embarassement for only reading it now. Also, I don’t know how it is with you, but I’m often wary to read such widely acclaimed books anyway, as there’s something so “Rik the people’s poet” about reading Said, or Chomsky for that matter. It can look poseurish and nobody wants to come over as that.

Nevertheless, Orientalism is a genuinely important book, even now, thirty years after its first publication. It’s main argument — that Asia in general and the Middle East in particular have long been misrepresented in the west as “the Orient”, an exotic world filled with prejudices and cliches in order to serve imperialist goals in the region — may look a bit obvious now, not as radical as it was at first publication, but this is in great part because Orientalism laid out this argument so convincingly first. In fact it had such an impact, that even thirty years onwards there are still people trying to cut it down to size, as a quick Google search shows. It touched a nerve, perhaps not in the least because Said was an outsider to the academic orientalist tradition he was criticising.

Don’t blog, organise

Published on October 21, 2007

Hamas knows how to organise

Avedon:

One reason why a lot of Democratic Party insiders have a lot of contempt for bloggers is that we are sitting in front of our computers getting fat rather than getting out where it becomes a public affair. It’s all very well to phone and mail legislatures (and you should), but you need to be out there where people can see you.

Yes, I know people are still shy about being associated with the circus, but visibility matters. It’s a lot harder for the talking heads to pretend that Bush is still popular and people don’t mind the destruction of the Constitution if they’re being deafened by protests.

And 2007 is not 1968. The public isn’t freaked out by hippies anymore, it’s freaked out by losing a major American city, and being known as a nation of torturers, and having our money sucked away by an illegal war and assorted con-men in expensive suits.

Thom Hartmann often points out that neither of the Roosevelts ran as progressives, and Lyndon Johnson certainly didn’t run on civil rights. When progressives came to FDR with their program he let them know that he was convinced, but he needed one more thing: “Make me.”

They did it because we made them. It wasn’t done just by people sitting at home and writing.

Avedon is right. Blogging is a great way to write away your frustrations about politics, but in itself it has a limited capability to change things for the better. Blogs are good at getting you informed about things not covered much in the mainstream media or helping likeminded people discover each other, not to mention help people realise that they’re not alone. But becoming aware and informed is only the first stage of becoming political active. After that, you need to act. Unfortunately, blogging is seductive and you do get the feeling of having achieved something from just having written about something, so it’s easy to keep blogging instead of taking that next step.

For the rightwing this doesn’t matter, as to them blogs are just another part of the noise machine, but us lefties have to be aware that blogs are just one tool we need to use if we want to change things.

The elders won’t save the world

Published on July 19, 2007

It is the sort of initiative a Guardian reader can’t help but love: Nelson Mandela gathering the world’s most respected elder statesmen into a sort of worldleader superhero group, the Elders:

Nelson Mandela marked his 89th birthday yesterday with the launch of a group of world-renowned figures who plan to use several Nobel peace prizes and “almost 1,000 years of collective experience” to tackle global crises which governments are unable or unwilling to confront.

“Using their collective experience, their moral courage and their ability to rise above nation, race and creed, they can make our planet a more peaceful and equitable place to live,” said the former South African president.

Mr Mandela, looking frail and walking with a stick, said the group, to be known as the Elders, was created at the initiative of Sir Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel, who organised the funding.

Its members include former US president Jimmy Carter, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and former archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu. The former Irish president Mary Robinson and Bangladeshi philanthropist Muhammad Yunus are also included, with others expected to be invited to join. Mr Mandela said the group could become a “robust force for good” in dealing with challenges
ranging from climate change and global pandemics, such as Aids and malaria, to “that entirely human-created affliction, violent conflict”.

It is an initiative sprung from the same mindset as Live 8 or Live Earth, or the idea that Tony Blair would make a good Middle East peace envoy now he’s an ex-prime minister. It’s the idea that celebrities can change the world, because they can get people mobilised and interested, while worldleaders listen to them and respect them. Activism, but safe activism, as it is our elders and betters doing the work for us, and all we need to do is sent them “our fecking money”, relax and watch the popstars cavorting on stage.

But it will never change anything because it’s designed not to do so. Like planting a tree to make up for your plane flight, it’s meant to assuage your guilt without actually doing anything. It’s sad to see Nelson Mandela, at one point a genuine freedom fighter and revolutionary, being co-opted this way.

The art of reviewing

Published on June 20, 2006

No matter how crap I find my reviews the next day, I can’t help but think that at least I’m still doing reviews, rather than ill-disguised hitpieces. The English socalled quality newspapers especially have a nasty habit of abusing their bookreviews; here are two from the supposedly liberal Observer that annoyed me today

The first comes via commenter Dearkitty and is an Observer review of Richard Ingrams’ The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. What annoyed me especially here was the opening paragraph:

If William Cobbett hadn’t existed, few people today would feel the need to invent him. Best known for Rural Rides, his socio-lyrical tour of England in the 1820s, Cobbett’s early life is a chaos of politics, tangled up in the kind of issues which are world-shattering to those who live through them but forgotten in a generation.

I can’t stand the jocular matey tone in which Cobbett is dismissed here. It also shows an uncanny lack of history to dismiss the cause of parliamentary reform and extended voting rights for the common man as “the kind of issues” that are “forgotten in a generation”. The rest of the review is almost as awful, written to template: “catchy” opening, some discussion of the subject of the book done with not too much accuracy, with less than half the review actually talking about the book itself and never actually coming out in judgement of it.

The other review is more vile and more dangerous, a hatchet job on Noam Chomsky, which “Lenin” neatly dissected.
Here it is the last two paragraphs that got on my tits:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: ‘Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others – have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.’

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world’s greatest – if flawed and selfish – democracy going to the polls.

There are several things to object to here: the deliberate and stupid misreading of Chomsky’s argument in the worst possible light, the histrionic fashion in which he accuses Chomsky of hypocrisie –“is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky” — “Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?” — “Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?” and finally, the great slobbering sucking up of those last two sentences. It fair turns the stomach.

It turns the stomach even more so, because it is the Blair defence. Everytime Blair has been confronted by angry members of the public and is held accountable for his actions towards Iraq, he comes out with the same old line, that you are allowed to your opinion because you are living in a country, in which you have the right to criticise your government (nervous hand gesutre, sweaty forehead) and should the people of Iraq not have that right?

Not that anyone is ever convinced by this pap, but it is a nice way to claim the moral high ground and any misdeeds are swept under the carpet – never mind Iraq is in a perpeptual civil war and embassy employees cannot reveal who they work for without being killed, at least the Iraqies are free now. In the same way, as long as Chomsky is not dragged from his office and burned in front of M.I.T., clearly his criticisms of the United States are without ground. Because this great United States is still a democracy and that excuses any and all misdeeds, which will anyway surely be resolved by the voters in the next elections.