I'm not surprised to see Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), coming out supporting the NED-funded and organized bogus Tibet protests and its fake leader, Dalai Lama. Are you?
Neith I am surprised that you can't find a single word of support or sympathy in Jahanbegloo's work for, say, Gazans who are living in the largest prison on the planet by the people Jahanbegloo never wants to anger. Or perhaps the universal rules of human dignity that Jahanbegloo praises, do not fully apply to anyone that the Israeli establishment doesn't agree with.
As the late Richard Rorty brilliantly explains, Europe and the U.S. have a very long history to define who is fully human so that those 'universal' rules could be applied to them.
The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.
To make our case, we anti-foundationalists point to unpleasant historical facts such as the following: The words of the Declaration were taken, by the supposedly democratic government of the US, to apply only to people of European origin. The American Founding Fathers applied them only to the immigrants who had come across the Atlantic to escape from the monarchical governments of Europe. The idea that native Americans – the Indian tribes who were the aboriginal inhabitants – had such rights was rarely taken seriously. Recalcitrant Indians were massacred.
Again, it was only a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence that the citizenry of the US began to take women's rights seriously – began to ask themselves whether American females were being given the same opportunities for the pursuit of happiness as were American males. It took almost a hundred years, and an enormously costly and cruel civil war, before black Americans were given the right not to be held as slaves. It took another hundred years before black Americans began to be treated as full-fledged citizens, entitled to all the same opportunities as whites.
Looking deeper at the Dutch government-funded Radio Zamaneh's 'Andisheh' (or Ideas) section reveals an uncomfortable truth about what this project actually pursues.
Abdee Kalantari, a U.S.-based regular contributor to this section (and his friend Mehdi Khalaji) has for over the past year consistently recycled Bernard Lewis' arguments. He explicitly dismisses the entire idea of colonialism and advocates such a Eurocentric and Universalist inquiry that, if translated into English, could even be shockingly racist. (Example: Why is the West Afraid of the "Islamic Bomb"?)
The most interesting aspect of all this is that his shallow, racist, and Orientalist articles are not only being handsomely paid by Radio Zamaneh, but they are sadly republished in a reformist daily newspaper in Iran, called Kargozaran, which is run by allies of Hashemi Rafsanjani and is named after their political party, Hezb-e Kargozaran. They probably pay Kalantari for them too. (For instance, in September 2007, eight articles were published in Radio Zamaneh and Kargozaran in a series titled ''A critque of new-nativism'.)
This basically means that the Dutch government is directly funding and advocating a certain line of thinking in the mainstream Iran-based media, and yet it is being tolerated by the Iranian government.
But let's imagine if one wants to challenge Kalantari's prose, given that Radio Zamaneh has never commissioned any critique or counter view to these pieces, who could spend so much time and energy to continuously writing criticism of Zamaneh's articles without being compensated? And if one produces such critiques, how could he or she give it the same exposure that Kalantari's pieces get thanks to the wealthy publishers of his stuff in Amsterdam or in Tehran?
No wonder why Edward Said and other post-colonial thinkers are virtually unknown within Iranian intellectual circles in Iran. From the one hand, writings of the likes of Kalantari are being commissioned and published in Iran by the Euro-American public diplomacy machine, from the other hand the government in Iran doesn't get the necessity of challenging these ideas.
Here is my latest column fro The Guardian's Comment is Free website:
For sixteen years, Iranian government was in the hands of the Euro-American educated bureaucrats who were gradually departing from the specific subjectivity (rejection of the universals, in Foucault's term) which brought about the Iranian uprising of the 1979. The spectre of modernity slowly started to dominate everything, from the economy to the politics, and the two consequtive administrations picked up a similar project of modernisation which the shah had previously failed to continue, and with it, the gloomy consequences started to wane in too: corruption, incompetence, and socio-economic inequality.
I am really surprised how those, like Noam Chomsky, who are so strongly against any type of American intervention in other countries, can support Akbar Ganji's blatant -- and shameless -- call for intervention in Iran. Can someone just show Ganji's recent article in the Newsweek, titled 'The Fight For Iran's Freedom', to these people who put their valuable signatures under whatever nonsense that Ganji's colonized mind produces?
In this struggle, as in the general fight for democracy and human rights, Iranians need the support of the international community, including the American people. At this moment, the best thing Americans could do for us would be to prevent their own government from launching another war in the Middle East and to urge it to desist from threatening Iran with military strikes and regime change. Such rhetoric only strengthens the Iranian regime and makes our work more difficult.
Iran's pro-democracy movement is rooted in the country's moral, cultural and spiritual values. The fight for freedom is our own responsibility, not that of the Bush administration. Iranians need the American people to support us by lobbying their government to adopt policies that will help the forces of democracy and civil society. The Middle East desperately needs peace, not another war.
by Michel Foucault
Published in Corriere della Sera, November 26, 1978
Tehran – Iran's year-long period of unrest is coming to a head. On the watchface of politics, the hand has hardly moved. The semi-liberal September government was replaced in November by a half-military one. In fact, the whole country is engulfed by revolt: the cities, the countryside, the religious centres, the oil regions, the bazaars, the universities, the civil servants, and the intellectuals. The privileged rats are jumping ship. An entire century in Iran – one of economic development, foreign domination, modernization, and the dynasty, as well as its daily life and its moral system-- is being put into question.
I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at forecasting the past. However, I would like to try to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice is still being rolled. It is perhaps this that is the work of a journalist, but it is true that I am nothing but a neophyte.
Iran was never colonized. In the nineteenth century, the British and the Russians divided it into zones of influence, according to a pre-colonial model. The came oil, the two World Wars,and the Middle East conflict,and the great confrontation in Asia. At one stroke, Iran moved to a pre-colonial position within the orbit of the United States. In a long period of dependency without direct colonization, the country's social structures were not radically destroyed. These social structures were not completely overturned, even by the surge of oil revenue, which certainly enriched the privileged, favoured speculation, and permitted an over-provisioning of the army. The changes did not create social forces, however. The bourgeois of the Bazaar was weakened, and the village communities were shaken by the agrarian reform. However, both of the survived enough to suffer from the dependency and the changes that it brought, but also enough to resist the regime that was responsible for these changes as well.
This same situation had the opposite effect on the political movements. In the half-light of dependency, they too subsisted, but could not sustain themselves as real forces. This was due not only to repression, but also to their own choices. The Communist Party was tied to the USSR, was compromised by the occupation of Azerbaijan under Stalin, and was amphibious in its support of the 'bourgeois nationalism' of Mossadeq. With respect to the National Front, Heir of this same Mossadeq, it has been waiting for fifteen years, without making a move, for the moments of a liberalization that it did not believe to be possible without the permission of the Americans. During this time, some impatient cadres from the Communist Party were becoming technocrats for the regime. They were dreaming of an authoritarian government that would develop a nationalist politics. In short, the political parties had become victims of the 'dependent dictatorship' that was the shah's regime. In the name of realism, some played the card of the independence, others that of freedom.
Because of, on the one hand, the absence of a colonizer-occupier and, on the other, the presence of a national army and a seizable police force, the political-military organizations, which elsewhere organized the struggle for decolonization and which, when the time came, found themselves in a position to negotiate independence and impose the departure of the colonial social phenomenon. This does not mean that the rejection is confused, emotional, or barely self-conscious. On the contrary, it spreads in an oddly effective manner, from the strikes to the demonstrations, from the bazaars to the universities, from the leaflets to the sermons, through shopkeepers, workers, clerics, teachers, and students. For the moment, however, no party, no man, and no political ideology can boast that it represents this movement. Nor can anyone claim to be at its head. This movement has no counterpart and no expression in the political order.
The paradox, however, is that it constitutes a perfectly unified collective will. It is surprising to see this immense country, with a population distributed around two large desert plateaus, a country able to afford the latest technical innovations alongside forms of life unchanged for the last thousand years, a country that yet languishing under censorship and the absence of public freedoms, and yet demonstrating an extraordinary unity in spite of all this. It is the same protest, it is the same will, that is expressed by the doctor from Tehran and a provincial mullah, by an oil worker, b a postal employee, and by a female student wearing the chador. This will includes something rather disconcerting. It is always based on the same thing, a sole and very precise thing, the departure of the shah. But for the Iranian people,this unique thing means everything. This political will years for the end of dependency, the disappearance of the police, the redistribution of oil revenue, an attack on corruption, the reactivation of Islam, another way of life and new relations with the West, with the Arab countries, with Asia, and so forth. Somewhat like the European students in the 1960s, the Iranians want it all, but this 'all' is not a 'liberation of desires.' This political will is one of breaking away from all that marks their country and their daily lives with the presence of global hegemonies. Iranians also view the political parties – liberal or socialist, with either a pro-American tendency or a Marxist inspiration – or, it is better to say, the pontifical scene itself, as still and always the agents of these hegemonies.
Hence, the role of this almost mythical figure, Khomeini. Today, no head of state, no political leader, even supported by the whole media of his country, can boast of being the object of such a personal and intense attachment. These ties are probably the result of three things. Khomeini is not there. For the last fifteen years, he has been living in exile and does not want to return until the shah has left. Khomeini says nothing, nothing other than no – to the shah, to the regime, to dependency. Finally, Khomeini is not a politician. There will not be a Khomeini party; there will not be a Khomeini government. Khomeini is the focal point of a collective will. What is the unwavering intransigence seeking? Is it the end of a form of dependency where, behind the Americans, an international consensus and a certain 'state of the world' can be recognized? Is it the end of a dependency of which the dictatorship is the direct instrument, but for which the political manoeuvres could well be the indirect means? It is not only a spontaneous uprising that lacks political organization, but also movement that wants to disengage itself from both external domination and internal politics.
After I left Iran, the question that I was constantly asked was, of course, 'Is this revolution?' (This is the price at which, in France, an entire sector of public opinion becomes interested in that which is 'not about us.') I did not answer, but I wanted to say that it is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.
One can understand the difficulties facing the politicians. They outline solutions, which are easier to find than people say. They range from a pure and simple military regime to a constitutional transformation that would lead from a regency to a republic. All of them are based on the elimination of the shah. What is it that the people want? Do they really want nothing more? Everybody is quite aware that they want something completely different. This is why the politicians hesitate to offer them simply that, which is why the situation is at an impasse. Indeed, what place can be given, within the calculations of politics, to such a movement, to a movement through which blows the breath of a religion that speaks less of the hereafter than of the transfiguartion of this world?
If nothing else, Mike Huckabee's surprising win in Iowa last week is yet another evidence why Laclah and Boudriallard are right on target in their ideas against media as the determining factor in elections. He had spent almost zero money in Iowa and don quite a tiny bit of campaigning there.
Is it just me or you also think the climate change has become a convenient escape for many celebrities who are under social pressure to get involved in public activism, but can not afford the risk of antagonizing certain sources of political power?
I mean, don't you think for, say Paris Hilton, it is much less risky to fight for the cause of climate change rather than the Iraqi occupation?
Ultimately, the responsibility for climate change is so distributed that it almost doesn't bear on anyone's shoulders, and at the end of the day, you can always blame God or nature, anyway.
Just a thought, while I'm supposed to finish four essays until the first week of January. :)
Three months in the wonderful SOAS' MA programme as the Film and Media centre, I can say the most important thing I've learned so far is summarised in two readings:
Both are challenging the notion of the society as a systematic, coherent and total(ised) entity, as well as demystifying the concept of masses, as a de-historised, finalised, totallised, passive and easily controllable concept.
Basically, unlike what a lot of media theories constitute, media can't simply control the masses, even though the elite who runs the media tend to think so.
A great recent example to me is a new poll (I know that polls are not reliable for the same reason that there is no such thing as masses, accorind at least to Baudrillard) that shows two third of the Israelis are not yet bought into the idea of the necessity of attacking Iran; and all this despite such severe and ongoing propaganda against Iran in Israel by almost all the media outlets.
That doesn't mean activists should not resist the process of hegemonic articulation according to the interests of the rich and the powerful in any given society. But they (or maybe I should say we here) should all be aware that putting all our energy in countering these processes of articulation is as ineffective on the public opinion as the attempts by those who run the media.
I learnt a big lesson form my last month's visit to the United States:
A country whose leader's name (say, King Abdollah in Jordan) you can't pronounce loud in public is quite similar to one where you can't say the name of it's biggest enemy (say Osama Bin Laden in the U.S.) loud in public.
Continuing from my post about the politics behind the use of the word 'moderate' in the Anglo-saxon media, today I'm going to reveal the meaning of 'populist.'
Whenever you see the word 'populist' in description of a politician, you can change it to "an elected politician who has some socialist elements in its economic views."
No matter how much popular a capitalist politician, elected or unelected, is and what kind of methods they use to appeal to the poor, they are never described as 'populist.'
I have come up with my own definition of censorship lately and I have used in my recent presentations in Ottawa and in New York City. Let me know what you think about it:
Censorship is controlling the reality by constructing various versions of it.
I think this could provide a start for a different way of analysing and talking about censorship in the media. Especially because it is inclusive enough to cover sophisticated form of censorship such as embedded journalism and disinformation campaign as well as the more primitive forms such as banning publications etc.
We had a seminar today: 'Media in transitional societies' by Professor Colin Sparks from Westminster University.
He was trying to "explain" the role of media in transitional societies, with a focus on China, Russia, and Poland and I think the very source of my problem with it lies in the word "explaining."
if there are three methods of research (or ways of knowing), i.e. description, explanation, and interpretation, I think at the core of the first two lies the ultimate but latent goal of "control."
We explain things to be able to control them, and in this context, the fact that this approach has been the dominant approach toward sciences, even human science, since the Enlightenment in Europe is very telling. They wanted to explain better their colonies to control them better. Explanation is always about control.
What the lecturer was doing today was an attempt to explain the relationship between the media and the masses in a transitional society, or how the media controls the masses in those societies. In other words, he was trying to control the very control the media applies on the masses.