By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, November 4, 2006 Whatever one may think of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, one can only cringe at investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s >reported assertion that “There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq.”
Murderous? Quite a harsh accusation directed against American troops at war. No doubt this message has already been carried back to Iraq where it can only stiffen the resolve of the insurgents as they gun down Americans as well as Iraqis (which may or may not qualify as “murderous” in Hersh’s view). Aside from this likely de facto assistance to the enemy, Hersh’s accusation was distinguished by a poor choice venue: Hersh decided to denounce the allegedly criminal character of American soldiers at an address outside the US, at McGill University in Montreal. There is no accounting for this particular tastelessness: Hersh could have easily pocketed honoraria in US currency at scores of American universities where his denigration of the troops would have been at least as welcome as in Montreal.
Hersh’s blindness to the impropriety of holding this sort of diatribe on foreign soil is stunning. (Or is it the blindness of his booking agent: googling “Seymour Hersh Montreal” to collect background for this blog, I found that the first pop-up ad on the right of the screen directs the reader to the agency that can bring Hersh to your hall. More on the fee structure below.)
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By Vernaccia · Saturday, October 28, 2006 Mr. Prodi has been extraordinarily busy lately. First, he went to Spain to visit with his friend Zapatero, and found nothing better to do there than complain with the local press about things Italian. Airing one’s dirty laundry in public is not the most elegant and diplomatic thing to do, but Mr. Prodi evidently, and in this case, did not care about elegance or diplomacy.
Then, when in his office in Rome, he has been busy drafting the 2007 budget for Italy. It is a budget which, thanks to a huge tax increase, will bring the Italian middle class to its knees and has already prompted both Standard and Poor’s as well as Fitch to lower Italy’s rating to a historic low.
Not content with all these frantic and (de-)constructive activities, Mr. Prodi (also known in Italy as Mr. Mortadella, a nickname which in the English translation reads Mr. Bologna—his hometown—or Baloney!) has found the time to state something seemingly sensible on the issue of the Islamic veil.
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By Benjamin Robinson · Friday, October 27, 2006 1.
Rightly, I think, Julia Hell argues that the RAF has become topical again because of 9/11—but why would Hell want to become part of this particular media construction of an affinity? Why should 9/11 call the left out onto the mat for its presumed past transgressions? What does 9/11 have to do with RAF? Are there any high profile leftists who, like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit with respect to the RAF during its period of activity, feel that they are at one with al-Qaeda? Isn’t it left writers like the late Eqbal Ahmad who long ago insisted that Osama bin Laden began as a White House hero fighting the Soviets with the Afghan Mujahideen?
If terrorism refers to a violent political tactic, then the left, like the right, has doubtless made use of it—”terror” was already Edmund Burke’s term for describing the French Revolutionary left in 1790. In 1969, a year before the RAF was founded, Karl Heinz Bohrer’s book Threatened Fantasy or Surrealism and Terror berated the left for reasons akin to Burke’s: its lack of style, its ideological muddling of a “beautiful terror” that is properly left unburdened by any political load. Sure, Burke and Bohrer are ready to concede, terrible violence happens under the auspices of more or less sublime sovereign powers, but political terror itself is, well, disgustingly low brow. A civilized response insists on distance; insists that a populist political vocabulary be shed. Like Bohrer just before the RAF, Hell after 9/11 has the same problem with the unwashed left: it takes terrorism too seriously as referring to the real world.
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By Julia Hell · Thursday, October 26, 2006 The first part of this essay was posted yesterday. It concluded with a characterization of the reluctance to criticize terrorism. “Leaden solidarity is this ‘strange emotional mixture’—as Negt called it—that keeps people, who know that terrorist violence is not a viable form of politics, from distancing themselves from terrorism—unambiguously and politically, that is, by rigorous political analysis.”
One would expect both, unambiguous distance and rigorous political analysis, from Chantal Mouffe, one of the most clear-headed and insightful political theorists, who recently published an article entitled “Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World” (South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2003). Mouffe argues that Schmitt’s geopolitical analysis in his Nomos could be usefully applied to contemporary issues. (Schmitt analyzes the nomos, or geopolitical order of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the law that regulated relations among European states between 1700 and the beginning of World War I. This inter-state law, while guaranteeing the global hegemony of Great Britain, contained war; that is, this international legal order kept wars among European states from escalating into wars of annihilation—until World War I. With World War I this system dissolved.) Mouffe is interested in Schmitt’s solutions to this collapse and what he considered its most dangerous side-effect, the dissolution of the classical state with its specific form of politics.
Mouffe reads Schmitt not merely as competent analyst of this dissolution, but adopts one of his solutions. In 1952, Schmitt argued that the antagonistic struggle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. might end with a new bipolar arrangement; or, and this is Mouffe’s preferred solution, it might lead to “the opening of a dynamics of pluralization, whose outcome could be the establishment of a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocks” (Mouffe, 249). Mouffe adopts this multipolar model with a few caveats: this new equilibrium would have some semblance to the earlier Nomos, it would have to be truly global, not only Euro-centric, and it would have to avoid the “pseudouniversalism arising from the generalization of one single system” (Mouffe, 250).
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By Julia Hell · Wednesday, October 25, 2006 This is the first part of a comment on the difficulty that parts of the Left sometimes have in criticizing terrorism. The second part will be posted tomorrow, and a reply by Ben Robinson will follow.
In February 1989, Gerhard Richter exhibited his so-called RAF cycle, October 18, 1977, in Krefeld, West Germany. (The cycle consists of fifteen photo-paintings referencing the Red Army Faction, the primary terrorist group to emerge from the West German New Left.) In a press conference, Richter announced the cycle as a reflection on the history of the European Left, a history of failed utopian projects: 1789 led to the reign of terror, Richter stated, Bolshevism led to Stalinism, and the guerilla struggle of the Red Army Faction collapsed with the suicide of its leadership in Stammheim Prison on October 18, 1977. Richter, who had left East Germany in 1961, did not foresee November 9, 1989; neither did he foresee one of unification’s side-effects, the interruption of the emerging discussion about the legacy of the RAF and, by implication, the legacy of 1968. But by the early 1990s, this debate resurfaced and has since continued unabated.
Why this growing interest in the RAF? Obviously, there is more at stake than the revision of West German history in the wake of 1989. Gerd Koenen, one of the first to critically explore the connection between the student movement’s disintegration into dogmatic splinter-groups and the RAF recently published an article entitled “Terror und Moderne.” Similarly, many of the films, plays, and exhibits dealing with RAF produced since the 1980s as well as the scholarly work that has developed around this material often reference the anti-globalization movement, or the question of political violence. Much of this German (and U.S. American) discussion is thus, in more or less explicit terms, a conversation about September 11, the Iraq war and the so-called “War on Terror.”
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By Fred Siegel · Friday, October 20, 2006 Last Thursday, October 12, NYU sponsored a forum on “Religion and the Limits of Tolerance” in the Netherlands. On one side were Fritz Bolkestein, an articulate critic of Dutch immigration policy, and the now famed Hirsi Ali, the Somali and Muslim born Dutch woman whose criticism of Islam has produced Islamist death threats so that she’s been forced to live under guard. On the other side were the self-described Leftists, novelist Bas Heijne and NYU professor Tony Judt, who served as both moderator and participant.
Bolkestein, a large thick bodied man in his 60s with a shock of white hair, acknowledged that there should be “leeway for Islamic practices on matters such as slaughtering and burial practices, but not on basic values.” Using as his yardstick the UN Declaration of Human Rights, he said Western culture was far superior to a “fossilized Islam.” “I am judgmental,” he smiled, “I prefer New York to Philadelphia.” Noting that such statements led some to accuse him of “triumphalism,” he quipped that people in the third world shout “Yankee go home, but then add please take me with you.” His comment reminded me of a visit to the Arab village of Um El Fahem, which lies at the narrowest point in Israel right on the Israeli-Palestinian border. It’s a well to do town of beautiful red tiled roofs atop three and four story houses. When I asked the mayor, who is an Islamist, if he wanted, as had been suggested by Israeli rightists, to join Palestine as part of land swap, he replied, “No, we have a very high standard of living here.”
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