By Danilo Breschi · Sunday, February 18, 2007 Last February 3, a policeman, Filippo Raciti, 38 years old, was killed by a “fan” during an urban battle outside the stadium of Catania after the soccer match Catania-Palermo. As of this writing, the murderer has not been identified. He could well be a teenager. He could have used a steel bolt or perhaps a basin ripped out of a stadium bathroom to pummel the policeman’s liver. The investigations continue. The policeman was married and the father of two young sons.
In Italy the violence of soccer fans is not a new phenomenon. It could be largely solved through legitimate repression, an appropriate application of legal violence by the state to establish a respect for law in order to prevent its violation. Yet there has not been adequate legislation to address the problem, and the best current laws have never been enforced. The primary issue has never been money—even though soccer is big business in Italy.
The key problem is that there is no civic culture to sustain law and order (a formula which most of the Italian intelligentsia reject as “fascist”). A pseudo-sociological culture has similarly rejected the term “repression,” replacing it with “pre-emption,” even though very little has been pre-empted during the past thirty years. The result? Every year there is plenty of fighting around soccer games, and sometimes someone dies, but nothing changes.
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By Jay A. Gupta · Sunday, January 28, 2007 In the streets of Beirut, one notices a preponderance of Lebanese flags—hanging out of windows, on cars, in doorways, on buildings. A nationalist gesture, it paradoxically signifies the opposite. Both the “opposition” and government supporters are equally zealous flag wavers. Meant to signify the universal of nationalism, the flag in fact symbolizes fragmentation and impermeable particularity. In this sense, the flag truly represents Lebanon.
It is difficult to imagine what a “united” Lebanon would be. There is a deep and chronic lack of acknowledgement of genuine otherness. In order to unite, there first has to be acknowledgement and tolerance of genuine difference. Lack of respect for boundaries seems to be a nationwide difficulty, seen at both the individual and collective levels. One is indeed tempted to demand a theory—psychoanalytic, speculative, or otherwise—of social boundary malformation. From traffic patterns, to interpersonal relations, to sectarian violence, Lebanon is beset with problems that appear diagnosable in such terms. At the individual level, it does not seem to be particularly inspired by belligerence that people do not recognize lines in banks and airports, or do not honor norms of basic courtesy such as reflexively yielding partial passage on sidewalks and in doorways. These seem rather to be microsocial, sensuous indications of broader social attitudes that fail to recognize the genuine existence and autonomy of others. I believe that, at the highest cultural level—politics—these attitudes achieve their full expression and significance in and as sectarianism.
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By Jay A. Gupta · Tuesday, January 23, 2007 The Telos blog devoted much space to the war in Lebanon and the character of the reporting, especially the predisposition in the New York Times and elsewhere to tilt to Hizbollah. Exactly why the Western media more often than not express hostility toward pro-Western forces and trim journalistic vocabulary to give anti-Western forces a pass is part of the ideological constellation of the present. As a democratically elected government faces a mortal threat, the West is even less active than it has been in Darfur. Jay A. Gupta, a Telos contributor from Beirut, submits the following anatomy of the problem with the press—RB
Today in Lebanon one wonders what the media interest is in calling a violent mob “protesters”, and civic chaos a “strike”. This is the rhetoric of the self-styled “opposition”, terms uncritically picked up by the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times. They are the terms normally used to describe democratic processes. However, these news organizations are unwittingly, mystifyingly serving as propaganda engines for Hizbullah. The terms are not placed in quotation marks, which would serve to indicate that they reflect the opinions and views of an organization whose stated purpose is to bring down a democratically elected government (however when speaking of the views of that government, the word “coup” is put in quotation marks). “Strikes” normally do not involve nationwide blockage of highways and the burning of vehicles with the intention to bring down a government. It is therefore stunning to find these respectable news organizations so haplessly blinded by the rhetoric of an organization that generally appears to have outright contempt for democratic principles, but which finds it politically propitious to describe itself has having respect for them.
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By Danilo Breschi · Saturday, January 6, 2007 The radical lawyer John Cooke prosecuted the King of England, Charles I, in 1649—and in doing so opened a chapter in legal history that reverberates 357 years later. Lawyer and human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson, in an extract from his book The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), describes Cooke’s pivotal role and assesses its modern implications:
Cooke’s charge began with a fundamental proposition: the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern ‘by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise’. It had been with the criminal object of securing unlimited and tyrannical power that Charles I had levied war against Parliament and had set out to destroy the very people whose life and liberty he was obliged to preserve. To bring home his guilt for the crippling loss of English life on both sides in the war he had started in 1642, Cooke invoked the doctrine which is called, in modern war-crimes courts, ‘command responsibility’:
‘By which it appears that he, the said Charles Stuart, has been and is the occasioner, author and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars and therefore guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to the nation acted and committed in the said wars or occasioned thereby.’
The charges against Milosevic at The Hague convey the same idea—the responsibility of the commander for all the natural and probable consequences of his commands. Cooke alleged not only high treason, but ‘other High Crimes’, which he spelled out in the final paragraph: Charles Stuart he impeached as ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. In a nutshell, what the Solicitor-General had created was a new offence, one that could condemn most of the crowned heads of Europe at the time, and many of the dictators and undemocratic rulers who would come to power in the nations of the world in the following centuries. He had made tyranny a crime.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, December 21, 2006 As noted previously here, the two points in the title need to be thought together: Baker’s ISG call to “talk” with Iran and the Iranian students’ protests against domestic repression in the Islamic Republic.
Critics of the ISG report regularly face the smarmy response: well, golly gee, what’s wrong with talking?
As a problem of theory, one could answer: plenty. Is talk a substitute for action? All talk and no action? Is talk a façade of comity designed to mask clandestine sins? Del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho. Still, the advocates of talk can typically claim the moral high ground in a culture in which talk, discourse, and discussion are the ultimate values.
This valorization of discussion is pure enlightenment: Kant’s public use of reason. Yet the value of talk only holds if all the interlocutors participate in the public on equal terms. The moral standing of talk presumes that all arguments can be heard: otherwise the talk is conspiracy or “secret diplomacy.” The objection to the ISG’s call for talks is not a rejection of speech as such: it is an indication of the suspicion figures like Baker and Perry arouse. We suspect that they will use the moral (Kantian) resonance of talk in order to pursue immoral (Machiavellian) ends.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 18, 2006 The Iraq Study Group has, notoriously, called for “talks” with Iran, as if there were reasonable interlocutors in Ahmadinejad’s gang. The octogenarian sages of that bipartisan committee evidently know something that Iranian students don’t—or is it perhaps the other way around. While Baker, blinded by the rose-colored glasses of realism (“let’s make a deal” is the core of his philosophy), hopes to practice his conversational Farsi, people who really have to live in the Islamic Republic know better and, as reported widely, students in Tehran have courageously confronted the regime. Bloggers in the safety of the US may quibble over the terminological propriety of “Islamic fascism” (“how can they be fascist if they don’t speak German,” they ask cleverly). But when Mahmoud the Magnificent visited Tehran’s Amir Kabir University last week, he reportedly faced some clear language: “Fascist president, the polytechnic is not for you.”
According to the Mail and Guardian, Ahmadinejad
faced chants of “Death to the dictator” as he addressed a gathering in the university’s sports hall last week. Several hundred students forced their way in to voice anger over a clampdown on universities since he became president last year.
That’s a key point to remember: yes, a clampdown on the universities in Iran—even as former President Khatami was being feted in western universities, from Harvard to Saint Andrews. Do western academics care about repression of scholars and students anywhere? (Answer: yes, they care about Ward Churchill, but that’s about it.)
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