tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50690984133240536732024-03-13T16:56:07.360-07:00Reflections From Damaged LifeConorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.comBlogger256125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-80549004977490522352024-02-28T02:34:00.000-08:002024-03-06T15:36:18.871-08:00Past and Present - Gramsci and Critique<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgq1tM8ijqn6gkCP7uvFLFHHmLqu9OwozWpDgbfgDDhhpgP4S3aPNE8dxcoqLS7AjZCPAi7YsFbMPKNpabwaLwETSvVjSKbOcaBggd6eQHG53s6mEN4pHIIGs7L_qk3wG5tFoeDsZ72t2sgYAUbefOLydZH5n6D2MQHXhDJDH5jlic-im_ft77M2odVOx4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="317" data-original-width="490" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgq1tM8ijqn6gkCP7uvFLFHHmLqu9OwozWpDgbfgDDhhpgP4S3aPNE8dxcoqLS7AjZCPAi7YsFbMPKNpabwaLwETSvVjSKbOcaBggd6eQHG53s6mEN4pHIIGs7L_qk3wG5tFoeDsZ72t2sgYAUbefOLydZH5n6D2MQHXhDJDH5jlic-im_ft77M2odVOx4=w621-h402" width="621" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Recently I acquired the Joseph Buttigieg translation of Antonio Gramsci's <i>Quaderni del carcere</i>, which was published in 1992, and which updates the Quentin Hoare/Geoffrey Nowell-Smith<i> Selections from the Prison Notebooks,</i> published in 1971<i>, </i>on which so many of us were dependent for decades. Buttigieg's work is a prodigy of translation, and a beautiful and valuable contribution to political thought generally and to the Left in particular.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Just opening the first volume and looking at random at Notebook 1 (work written in 1929 and 1930), it's almost impossible not to light upon passages intriguing, inspiring and penetrating. Here is note 156:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Past and present</i>: How the present is a <i>criticism </i>of the past, besides [and because of] 'surpassing' it. But should the past be discarded for this reason? What should be discarded is that which the present has 'intrinsically' criticized and that part of ourselves which corresponds to it. What does this mean? That we must have an exact consciousness of this real criticism and express it not only theoretically but <i>politically</i>. In other words, we must stick closer to the present, which we ourselves have helped create, while conscious of the past and its continuation (and revival). </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-71863017138944180902024-01-23T03:58:00.000-08:002024-01-23T09:57:35.845-08:00The Concept of the Political - Edward Said and Liberal Theory<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZDj5XWQt41BkTbQR6zCopy0mrEVH1_LgRHXVe_4tISp_759AgBtNXgwzYxFfMk4rHB3nT6xNWPDOAcLtc3Qjv377U50pfRTtftxaOQbbo15DrVehcdLw67wQPS_AXNnIDt1LhaDsaHSBVQvAMmG40pqF5E3PZaNTnZg884VGkBonXL3M30BRfzYF0UWk/s1440/With-Ibrahim-Abu-Lughod.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="979" data-original-width="1440" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZDj5XWQt41BkTbQR6zCopy0mrEVH1_LgRHXVe_4tISp_759AgBtNXgwzYxFfMk4rHB3nT6xNWPDOAcLtc3Qjv377U50pfRTtftxaOQbbo15DrVehcdLw67wQPS_AXNnIDt1LhaDsaHSBVQvAMmG40pqF5E3PZaNTnZg884VGkBonXL3M30BRfzYF0UWk/w589-h400/With-Ibrahim-Abu-Lughod.jpg" width="589" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>'Literary criticism' for my generation has nearly always espoused a purported 'politics'. Marxist criticism. Foucauldian criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, various deconstructionist forms of criticism, the various feminist criticisms - all argued that their activities were in some sense 'political'.</div><div><br /></div><div>Arguing that they were 'political' was for these schools a strategy, aimed at multiple ends. Most simply or crudely, such 'political' criticism seemed to be urgently 'relevant'. The claim to be 'political' suggested a 'relevance' that went beyond merely explicating or analysing the text in hand and which contributed to some wider context or problematic or issue. The reading of a text was part of some wider or larger (or more 'relevant') 'political' action, implicitly. Of course, this claim to relevance betrays an uncomfortable sense that literature and criticism might otherwise be, or seem, largely 'irrelevant', until read in the right 'political' way. Arguing for such 'political' (as against formal, or aesthetic, or psychological, or ethical, or philosophical) reading was a way of such criticism elbowing its way to the front of a crowded field.</div><div><br /></div><div>What this showed was that such criticism - any criticism - always embodied certain kinds of politics, if not always of the banner-waving kind the proponents of 'political' criticism seemed to favour. The politics thereby espoused were, in fact, first of all professional: calling oneself a 'Marxist' or a 'feminist' was a form of position-taking in one's field, in one's institution, in one's department. It was a way of edging out or competing with other critical projects or visions - even if such competition was never explicit (and sometimes it was), every critical system aspires to hegemony and even orthodoxy. So such criticism was 'political' in that sense. </div><div><br /></div><div>The worrying thing is that the professional and disciplinary politics were not always accompanied by a slightly wider sense of the politics of the institution - usually, the university institution. It was perfectly possible to be a 'postcolonial critic' while showing very little sense of the politics of the institution, of its structures and hierarchies, of how power is disposed through it. And further, it was also possible to be a 'postcolonial critic' while paying very little attention to the wider world beyond the university institution - to the realm of 'real world' politics, of the organisation of one's society and of relations within or between states. In other words, supposed radicalism could be and very often was and still is, limited to a particular way of reading a novel by Balzac or Jean Rhys. At this point, one realises that an academic claim on the terrain of 'the political' (as it came to be known, after the rise to prominence of the work of Carl Schmitt) is a very nebulous action and one deserving the greatest scepticism.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was always Edward Said's virtue that he was, from the start of his career, highly sensitive to this particular problem. He realised, by the late 1960s, that a claim to radicalism in scholarship was not necessarily attached to a radicalism outside the university - though at that time it was in many cases and notable cases such as that of his friend and comrade Noam Chomsky. For Said, and I've found this a convincing argument for decades, a truly radical intellectual performance must seek at some point to affiliate itself to or locate itself <i>vis-a-vis </i>a politics beyond the seminar room. The theoretical or abstract work must expose itself to the rough-and-tumble of activist politics on the street, and vice versa. This was a kind of concrete dialectical component to Said's thinking: an argument against any critical project that shut itself up in its own language, concepts, experiences, logics and had thereby ceased to be a truly critical enterprise and had colluded in its own institutionalization and self-reification.</div><div><br /></div><div>Said's way of achieving this was by doing what he famously called 'worldly' criticism. A lot of energy has been expended in parsing this term by Said's exegetes, but I have always thought that he meant something quite simple by it - he was referring to the idea that critical interpretation is an activity which takes place in locations and at times which are not limited by the page or by the classroom or the library - it takes place on the terrain of civil society as Gramsci explained it and it partakes of and is related to all sorts of other ideas and activities, as part of the overall ensemble that is a culture. Said once wrote that criticism is 'the present in the course of its articulation', and he pursued his critical work in that spirit - an agile, unpretentious, non-jargonistic attention to the way that we work on texts and that texts work on us, on how our work elaborates society and how society captures and uses our work.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1uZsBz4cUhENpJ92vYLTohUeGW1H5VaGASNgXQTo7en5w8FnL5SII9GkZXzFIgeV1bC6oLM5E9_IR2CxDvYhoKlrkFTPNPxymLGEZcM_A_AKr9Lzt5mUKm7QLwmkC4qQcYAH-mFwXBa6VY5sBUsIz0NZ3k9NCgPjbrmAw74GHADoE01qEeelBVN-wNTc/s1246/https___dev.lareviewofbooks.org_wp-content_uploads_2024_01_Unsettling-the-World.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1246" data-original-width="828" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1uZsBz4cUhENpJ92vYLTohUeGW1H5VaGASNgXQTo7en5w8FnL5SII9GkZXzFIgeV1bC6oLM5E9_IR2CxDvYhoKlrkFTPNPxymLGEZcM_A_AKr9Lzt5mUKm7QLwmkC4qQcYAH-mFwXBa6VY5sBUsIz0NZ3k9NCgPjbrmAw74GHADoE01qEeelBVN-wNTc/w426-h640/https___dev.lareviewofbooks.org_wp-content_uploads_2024_01_Unsettling-the-World.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Said's work has influenced many academic fields, and it has been important to many activists outside academia: cultural studies, history-writing, anthropology, philosophy, film studies, Palestine activism and political activism in and regarding the global South more widely. But political theory, especially of the American post-Rawlsian kind, has largely been exempt from this 'interference' by Said's influence and thoughts. So when I learned of Jeanne Morefield's <i>Unsettling</i> <i>the</i> <i>World</i>: <i>Edward</i> <i>Said</i> <i>and</i> <i>Political</i> <i>Theory</i> (2022), I was very excited and pleased. Morefield is a leading figure in a levy of political theorists and historians of ideas who have worked hard in the last couple of decades to revise our understanding of liberal theory in the wake of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Said was always interested in liberalism, even if often in a spirit of disappointment at this doctrine's weaknesses. Morefield's effort to bring Said's ideas into her field, and thereby to shake it up both intellectually and politically, is entirely to be welcomed. A full-scale confrontation between Said's 'political' idea of critique, and political theory as such, is long overdue, and now it has arrived.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have now published a review of <i>Unsettling</i> <i>the</i> <i>World</i> at the <i>Los</i> <i>Angeles</i> <i>Review</i> <i>of</i> <i>Books</i>, a great journal I am very proud to work with. My idea was initially accepted by Boris Dralyuk and Michele Chihara. More recently, the essay was improved greatly by the work of Elspeth Eberlee, Tom Lutz and AJ Urquidi. I am very grateful to them all - Elspeth in particular was tremendously helpful and kind.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><h2 class="styles_text__piq_Q text styles_titleMedium__ret1z styles_titleSmall__i1Q7F styles_title__rtFGG" style="--text-color: var(--color-text); --tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; color: var(--text-color); font-family: var(--font-serif); line-height: var(--line-height-110); margin-bottom: var(--margin); margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/empire-and-liberalism-a-saidian-reading-on-jeanne-morefields-unsettling-the-world/" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-size: large;">Empire and Liberalism—a Saidian Reading: On Jeanne Morefield’s “Unsettling the World”</span></a></h2></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-85089938644619955062024-01-01T03:01:00.000-08:002024-01-02T09:09:36.199-08:00Cycles of History - Ireland, empire and disciplinary change<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_-H0uz1O7ofFrXMZ45tCLbQIakdm30dkCfpmxgR8Fbhqq7Giv5UIizCn7-TjlDFwnGMeFo7gmBLkz_YKQS9NNhx9O32AsEMVW_rjipJhBUxYYmKZM3SLvgd0a80Jm0I8dz-FGInHRfMIAeoK33BiFrZ0Iw9AYsT_WtLTCGVXIkJIPqRLtfe2vRtIYTvo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_-H0uz1O7ofFrXMZ45tCLbQIakdm30dkCfpmxgR8Fbhqq7Giv5UIizCn7-TjlDFwnGMeFo7gmBLkz_YKQS9NNhx9O32AsEMVW_rjipJhBUxYYmKZM3SLvgd0a80Jm0I8dz-FGInHRfMIAeoK33BiFrZ0Iw9AYsT_WtLTCGVXIkJIPqRLtfe2vRtIYTvo=w642-h361" width="642" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">These days, the history of Ireland's relationship to empire is all the rage. There is discussion on campuses of the need to 'decolonise' the curriculum, to 'decolonise' English or History or other humanities disciplines. In older institutions, such as Trinity College Dublin, there is the felt need to acknowledge the connection of the University to the history of empire. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Much of this emphasis is, it seems to me, to be welcomed, though I also think that the capacity of modern university management cadres to appropriate, de-fang and re-purpose seemingly radical ideas - historically, there are few more radical than 'decolonisation' - in order to hegemonize, cloak and deliver downwards bureaucratic, undemocratic, and anti-intellectual 'reforms' is almost unlimited. The Irish universities, most of them developed after the mid-nineteenth century, trained students at the height of the Union and going into the age of high empire in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s. It is inconceivable that the horizons for such students and for their teachers did not extend to empire - as a sphere in which to travel, work, learn, make money fast, get involved in politics, forge a career. That Irish people experienced what Edward Said called 'the pleasures of imperialism' (writing about an Irish character's ability to move around India in the novel <i>Kim</i>) is in no way contradicted by the fact that a modern mass nationalism developed in Ireland at exactly the same time. Only the most crudely undialectical analysis could see an antinomy here. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And yet a certain purblind focus in Irish historiography, whether of the old nationalist or of the newer liberal 'revisionist' kind, has led the discipline to concentrate overwhelmingly on the history of the nation, of its cultural development, and on the expansion and contraction of the British state in it - expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the expansion of the economy and state apparatus in the nineteenth century, and then the great struggles to shake these connections off whether by constitutional-democratic means (Home Rule) or by force (violent uprisings in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916). But comparative focus has been much much rarer, and the new interest in empire is to that extent alone salutary.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4FjZVf5OWw-P7eMyU9smtrp2tajZ5rVBGgu1zr43H3MWvp9i0fZ_vmJMgPB_ziuvnjNXcOHL7LApA7jvBoiVor_njtd_4RiMQ4Z3ZSPTBM9m2C_N4rJFCdkmuc4OENR28Y7tPynQ5IVjzEQ-jgJM1XcVKSnIRhDKzagUyVq_kwPSYNgf7GK_6xhxsbVg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1042" data-original-width="768" height="613" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4FjZVf5OWw-P7eMyU9smtrp2tajZ5rVBGgu1zr43H3MWvp9i0fZ_vmJMgPB_ziuvnjNXcOHL7LApA7jvBoiVor_njtd_4RiMQ4Z3ZSPTBM9m2C_N4rJFCdkmuc4OENR28Y7tPynQ5IVjzEQ-jgJM1XcVKSnIRhDKzagUyVq_kwPSYNgf7GK_6xhxsbVg=w451-h613" width="451" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So one must welcome Jane Ohlmayer's book, <i>Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World,</i> published only last autumn. One welcomes too her recent <i>Irish Times</i> article, on the function of Ireland as a kind of 'laboratory' for colonial and imperial projects ('How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British Empire', <i>Irish Times</i>, December 27, 2023). One notes with interest, also, her rather more clunky or unsubtle wish to argue that the current 'conflict' in Israel/Palestine shows the watermark of the imperial age with which she is keen now to associate Ireland. There are indeed connections and points of comparison - partition, forms of nationalism and state-building, the involvement of former Black and Tan militiamen in policing the great Palestinian revolt of 1936 - 1939. And if one looks further, there is the interest of Zionist campaigners in the history of Irish nationalism, and more recently, the sense of a shared destiny between Northern Irish nationalists and the Palestinian nation under occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. These more local or detailed elements Ohlmayer does not focus on - she is a scholar of the early modern period. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But as a literary scholar, it is impossible to read this recent historiographic fascination with empire without the most profound and wry sense of <i>déja vu</i>. It is natural, as well as professionally and in careerist terms inevitable, that a writer like Ohlmayer will make her work and that of her confederates seem like some extraordinary novelty in her discipline, a paradigm shift which allegedly reflects the 'new Ireland' or 'multicultural Ireland' or 'global Ireland' or (worst of all) 'a more mature Ireland'. The felt need to de-name TCD's Berkeley Library, because the Irish philosopher was a slave owner is, apparently, evidence of the spirit of the age to which Ohlmayer is answering. But the simple fact is that she and her generation are not the first Irish historians to tackle this issue, and when one looks to literary studies, her work mostly executes an extraordinary elision of the work of a major group of Irish scholars. In her own discipline, historians like David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny were focused on Ireland's relation to early modern colonisation in the Americas as long ago as the 1970s. And Nicholas Mansergh, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge in the 1960s, wrote major books on Irish constitutional history in the context of empire. Turning to literary studies, my own area, the 1980s witnessed a torrent of interest in postcolonial studies. Influenced but not entirely steered by the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, major Irish scholars such as Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Emer Nolan, Colin Graham and Luke Gibbons completely revolutionized the way that Irish literature was read. Great writers such as Spenser, Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Yeats, Synge, Joyce and even Beckett were partly wrenched away from purely Anglocentric frames of understanding. The Irish element or context was shown to be of crucial importance to such figures. The plays and pamphlets of the Field Day company, starting most importantly with Brian Friel's <i>Translations</i> in 1980, put the themes of empire and colonisation and their cultural, ideological, ethical, linguistic implications, and the responses to them, on the cultural map. Deane's pamphlet 'Civilians and Barbarians' and Kiberd's pamphlet 'Anglo-Irish Attitudes', published in 1983 and 1984 respectively, explicitly argued for Ireland's role as an imperial laboratory. All of this, 40 years before the current wave of apparently 'innovative' enthusiasm for empire studies. And yet, most of this work is, in the current excitement, set aside or even forgotten. Not entirely forgotten by Ohlmayer - but not treated as an inheritance to be discussed either.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And, in comparison to the eager readership and welcome now accorded to Ohlmayer's work, what was the reward of the Field Day writers and other 'postcolonial' critics? Conor Cruise O'Brien and Colm Toibin suggested that the Field Day pamphleteers were the 'literary wing of the IRA'. Edna Longley, a southern Irish liberal who made her career as a revisionist polemicist and gifted poetry critic at Queens, could only sneer at the imbrication of 'Derry and Derrida' which she, ignorantly, found in Deane's work. Faced with Said's argument that Yeats partook in his poetry in the processes of Irish decolonisation, she could only crassly and mockingly suggest that Said's Ireland had clearly 'gone floatabout' to the Caribbean, while she alluded to Deane's 'powerful sense of Palestinian dispossession' without ever bothering to think about the implications of such a comparison. As late as 2000, a purportedly left-wing British historian, Stephen Howe, could write a large and apparently scholarly tome, devoted entirely to debunking the colonial and imperial framework for understanding Irish history and culture.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The great period of Irish literary postcolonial studies is over. The theme has become, as happens to every radical intellectual movement, an orthodoxy, one among many in literary studies. But this does not mean that the self-appointed new brooms in history-writing, such as Jane Ohlmayer, should not acknowledge the work of the recent past and see how they build upon the work of pioneers who faced opprobrium of a unique kind.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Conor</b></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-74349853353891900772023-12-18T14:01:00.000-08:002023-12-29T13:58:42.973-08:00Making a rogue state - Western complicity with Israeli crimes against humanity<p><br /></p><p>After a brief ceasefire, Israel's rolling attack on Gaza continues. Estimates of deaths in the Strip now are touching 20,000. Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza in ten weeks than Russia has in 20 months in Ukraine. Doubtless, Israel is striking some Hamas 'targets' or 'operatives' or even 'command and control centres'. But the 'collateral damage', the cost in civilian lives, is unimaginable. On a recent American TV programme, an Israeli official declared that Israel was killing only 2 civilians for every Hamas fighter killed, and proclaimed that the IDF was displaying the 'gold standard of urban warfare'.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>In a powerful article in the <i>New Yorker,</i> trying to pierce the formidable carapace of dead language and hypocrisy which encrusts so much public discussion of what is happening, the brilliant Russian-American (and Jewish) writer, Masha Gessen, has compared what is perpetrated in Gaza to the 'liquidation' of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Their essay caused ructions in Germany, where Gessen has just been awarded the Hannah Arendt Award. Many now ask if Arendt's writings about totalitarianism, about stateless people, about the Eichmann trial, could be published in the fervid atmosphere of purported anti-anti-Semitism in Germany. It's hard not to see in this frantic mood the murky <i>id</i> of Germany's past guilt and failures. And it reminds one that so often philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism are related.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>In the years of the Holocaust and persecution of the Jews of Europe, when the direct crimes were committed by the Nazis and their various proxies in the countries they conquered, crimes of a more oblique but enormously shameful kind were committed there and elsewhere - in the refusal of entry to Jewish refugees by many countries, including Ireland and the United States; in the willing acceptance of the concept of 'Judeo-Bolshevism' by the right wing all over the West; in the capacity of people in authority as well as ordinary citizens in territories conquered by the <i>Wermacht</i> to stand by while crimes of prejudice, murder and genocide were conducted in plain sight; in the willingness of the putatively socialist Soviet Union to negotiate a 'non-aggression pact' with Nazi Germany which facilitated the most shocking aggression against the sovereign state of Poland and the division of that country and in fact all of eastern Europe into German and Russian fiefdoms. </p><p>So now we have a proximate situation with Israel's monumental slaughter in Gaza. We have Western leaders - Biden, Sunak, Macron, von der Leyen, Scholz - giving Israel the clearest green light at the start of this process, and only very very slowly, at the cost of thousands of Palestinian lives, coming towards a point where supporting a ceasefire might seem like appropriate action. Even last week, EU leaders failed to agree on a call to ceasefire. We have the United States arming Israel with thousands of tons of ordnance, smart bombs, dumb bombs, voting billions of dollars in ongoing military aid.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>Since 1948, Israel has received $158 billion in military aid from America. Under the apparently pacific Obama administration, a deal was negotiated in 2016 that upped Israel's annual military aid from America to over $3.8 billion. Hours after the Hamas attacks on October 7, the United States began a massive deployment of military assets to the eastern Mediterranean, including two aircraft carrier battle groups - each one larger and more powerful than the navies of most countries in the world. American military liaison with Israel was greatly increased. The United States has deployed over 100 combat aircraft to the Middle East to intervene in protection of Israel. President Biden announced through October that his administration would put together an emergency aid package for Israel. On October 20, the President reported that this package which he would ask Congress to vote through would come to $14 billion, as part of a $105 billion overall deal. </p><p>The <i>Wall Street Journal</i> - no enemy of Israel - has reported that the USA has, since the current hostilities began, sent to Israel over 15,000 bombs to be delivered by aircraft or drones. Some of these are 'bunker buster' bombs, which drill down into the target surface before exploding. Some of them are laser-guided 'precision' munitions. Many are, however, unguided 'iron' bombs or 'dumb' bombs, whose deployment as well as effect is completely indiscriminate. The United States has re-supplied Israel with 57,000 155mm howitzer shells, for use by the IDF's American-supplied M109 self-propelled guns. The blast radius or zone of lethality for a 155mm shell is about 50 metres i.e. anything within a football-pitch-sized area of the point of impact of such a shell may be damaged or destroyed. Here is a graphic which provides information on such shellfire. Note the figures on shrapnel projection from each shell-burst:</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHY3e6R6WAyaIqjmpa-wxBUEFUCZAF1vFS7Ee8SIOrBeed_n3a3ybeKHN577ElVAMfjFxhONKhQy9sGiMHAYB-uBUBNFLW1CyV63K5SnMPmbM5pMYmKCCZ3C6lZFy8Mo1LOgRgqRczx7VRJGNKXvYeX81QU6GE7jrDU3PnBNFEmm9MlVXjfG5U7xyV8Uk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="831" data-original-width="992" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHY3e6R6WAyaIqjmpa-wxBUEFUCZAF1vFS7Ee8SIOrBeed_n3a3ybeKHN577ElVAMfjFxhONKhQy9sGiMHAYB-uBUBNFLW1CyV63K5SnMPmbM5pMYmKCCZ3C6lZFy8Mo1LOgRgqRczx7VRJGNKXvYeX81QU6GE7jrDU3PnBNFEmm9MlVXjfG5U7xyV8Uk=w575-h484" width="575" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>And here is an Israeli M109 in action: </p><p><br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYaob_7nUWML0uanj-cj374UcuB6_2ILRq0RxunzAhIEku4-P2LQzdvcbSVEhIqjfUBwN9N3FS9hv9o3fxC9MQ8lZUQaEm8-RNqeEGVmWuiZ1Ooas1Djeva5r_1I6ldd3gKXf6OyqJ72PaPeU5OWacT5D506o5FdlqcBSIyiUYt-hXcuIZSMKdIZogLYo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1500" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYaob_7nUWML0uanj-cj374UcuB6_2ILRq0RxunzAhIEku4-P2LQzdvcbSVEhIqjfUBwN9N3FS9hv9o3fxC9MQ8lZUQaEm8-RNqeEGVmWuiZ1Ooas1Djeva5r_1I6ldd3gKXf6OyqJ72PaPeU5OWacT5D506o5FdlqcBSIyiUYt-hXcuIZSMKdIZogLYo=w533-h356" width="533" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>The United States has also elected to send Israel large re-supplies of tank gun ammunition, to keep Israel's Merkava main battle tanks effective. On December 9, the Biden administration announced a manoeuvre to bypass the need for Congressional approval for the transfer of 14,000 shells to Israel (worth $106.4 million). This is part of a larger package which involved up to 45,000 tank shells. On the same day as the delivery was announced, State Department officials said that Washington was continuing to make it clear to Israel that it must comply with humanitarian law and avoid civilian casualties. Secretary of State Blinken provided detailed justification for the shells to Congress, arguing that their supply to Israel is in America's national security interest.</p><p>The shells will come from US Army inventories and consist of M830A1 MPAT 120mm tank cartridges and related components. <span style="background-color: white;"> The M830A1 MPAT is a type of tank ammunition used by the United States Army and Marine Corps. It is designed to provide a dual-purpose capability, with both anti-armour and anti-personnel effects. In t</span>he<span style="background-color: white;"> 120mm M830A1 MPAT (Multi-Purpose Anti-Tank) tank cartridges, t</span><span style="background-color: white;">he penetrator is made of depleted uranium, which provides increased density and armour-piercing capabilities. It is worth noting that depleted uranium (DU) ammunition, including the M830A1, has been subject to international debate and scrutiny due to concerns about the potential health and environmental risks associated with its use.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;">*****</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></p><p>Many analysts estimate that the kill rate due to Israeli munitions in Gaza is the highest any war or combat zone has witnessed since the Second World War. </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>The United States is not Israel's only armourer - the UK supplies Israel with military support, and Germany has reiterated that the defence of the State of Israel is part of its '<i>staatsraison</i>' or 'reason of state'. On the contortions of the latter, see Sabine Broeck's brilliant letter in the <i>Massachussetts Review</i>: </p><p><span face="arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 20px; text-decoration-line: underline;">Staatsraison: Dispatch From Germany | Mass Review</span></p><p><span face="arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 20px; text-decoration-line: underline;"><br /></span></p><p><a data-ctbtn="0" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.massreview.org%2Fnode%2F11675&usg=AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF" data-ved="2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.massreview.org%2Fnode%2F11675&usg=AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF&opi=89978449" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; outline: 0px;"></a></p><div class="notranslate TbwUpd YmJh3d NJjxre iUh30 ojE3Fb" style="align-items: center; display: flex; font-size: 12px; left: 0px; line-height: 1.3; padding: 0px; position: absolute; text-size-adjust: none; top: 0px;"><a data-ctbtn="0" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.massreview.org%2Fnode%2F11675&usg=AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF" data-ved="2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR-r-LirODAxVQSkEAHcJFA4sQFnoECC4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.massreview.org%2Fnode%2F11675&usg=AOvVaw1TJySLkSWE4OmlRndfZHZF&opi=89978449" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; outline: 0px;"><span class="H9lube" style="align-items: center; background-color: #f1f3f4; border-radius: 50%; border: 1px solid rgb(236, 237, 239); display: inline-flex; height: 26px; justify-content: center; margin-right: 12px; vertical-align: middle; width: 26px;"></span></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjis8N9dW91Nviw9F2HYTqqQWzcN3ooJfwppIau1DRZngly_cw24rQT7lKzSD-wB7Dtw4l2G297sTQA0KWosxs8TN-s3uSJ2nupjTr_vlaj6NCs3LYteC-N4EzQdU7frC-rBa-bRuvsY5h56ELO00vr3-bRQfpMTbfjyP8DDKJ5EbQThZPbMUiMhPsasIk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjis8N9dW91Nviw9F2HYTqqQWzcN3ooJfwppIau1DRZngly_cw24rQT7lKzSD-wB7Dtw4l2G297sTQA0KWosxs8TN-s3uSJ2nupjTr_vlaj6NCs3LYteC-N4EzQdU7frC-rBa-bRuvsY5h56ELO00vr3-bRQfpMTbfjyP8DDKJ5EbQThZPbMUiMhPsasIk=w365-h365" width="365" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">It is worth noting that Israel's overwhelming reaction currently in Gaza is not a new doctrine or approach. Many link it to the 'Dahiya doctrine', first articulated by IDF General Gadi Eizenkot during Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, in 2006. It involves the deliberate use of 'disproportionate' force against a guerrilla enemy. Here is Eizenkot in 2010: </p><p><span face="sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 14px;"><i>The method of action in Lebanon [in 2006] was that, in the first stage targets were attacked which formed an immediate threat, and in the second stage the population was evacuated for its protection, and only after the evacuation of the population were Hezbollah targets attacked more broadly. I am convinced that this pattern was a moral pattern, that it was correct to use, and if another campaign is required it will be correct to act in the same way. It is Hezbollah which transforms the hundreds of villages and the Shiite areas of Lebanon into combat spaces. I hope this understanding will cause the organization to consider carefully before it decides to use any more terror, kidnapping, or shootings.</i></span></p><p>At least three things stand out in Eizenkot's statement: 1) the idea of moving the population out of the combat zone - an apparently 'humanitarian' move, which is then undercut two sentences later; 2) the rhetorical formulation whereby it turns out to be Hezbollah which 'transforms the hundreds of villages and the Shiite areas of Lebanon into combat spaces', blaming the victims ('it is the children of Gaza who have brought this upon themselves' - MK Meirav Ben-Ari of the 'liberal' and 'centrist' Yesh Atid); and 3) the conviction that the 'pattern was a moral pattern'. Thus, a theorist and senior officer of the most moral army in the world. But it must also be noted that Israel has long had a policy or tendency of responding with overwhelming force to Palestinian raids into Israel, going all the way back to the Qibya raid on the West Bank in 1953, led by the young Ariel Sharon, which was, according to Israel, occasioned by the murder of an Israeli woman and her two children, and which resulted in the deaths of 69 Palestinian civilians. </p><p>The Israeli approach is typical of colonial regimes - British, French, South African - which frequently conducted 'punitive raids' to cow the colonised in the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century. One notes the '<i>razzias</i>' favoured by the French in their brutal pacification of Algeria, under Marechal Bugeaud in the 1840s - such as the extraordinary and savage massacre of the entire Ouled Rhia tribe, at Dahra - 900 men, women and children sealed up and suffocated in a cave. Or, even worse, the Sétif massacres of Algerian civilians by French forces in 1945. Algerians celebrating the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945 were severely policed by the local gendarmerie, and flags and banners calling for national independence were confiscated. Reports from Sétif incited violence in the countryside, and 102 <i>pieds-noirs</i> settlers were murdered by Algerians. Over the following six weeks, in a series of <i>ratissages</i>, the French army and colonial militias and vigilantes slaughtered at least 6000 Algerians around Sétif and Guelma, possibly as many as 30,000, in reprisal.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh1iPOCay4A5EFQUpnuKdgDHTD9wrFolLiPKvv4KEhpM-9CnVGTxAxIGvQ8sSXX8z6s12NyQJpbsJnW0533cBQHLsLVG_IxbvqPZPwRN6rlYAugpgmJyK4hBjg1G3jthXHSObZYJQfnpdJZxuccTw8RAyGZvckNCh8OuhslHbNU2IDGZ8L-I6fa90bbO3w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="694" data-original-width="1215" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh1iPOCay4A5EFQUpnuKdgDHTD9wrFolLiPKvv4KEhpM-9CnVGTxAxIGvQ8sSXX8z6s12NyQJpbsJnW0533cBQHLsLVG_IxbvqPZPwRN6rlYAugpgmJyK4hBjg1G3jthXHSObZYJQfnpdJZxuccTw8RAyGZvckNCh8OuhslHbNU2IDGZ8L-I6fa90bbO3w=w561-h320" width="561" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>The United States has voted against at least two resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly calling for a ceasefire. The United States has also used its veto on the UN Security Council to block two resolutions - one in late October and one on December 8 - calling for unconditional ceasefire.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>Accordingly, one can say that the United States is grossly complicit in the Israeli massacre of 20,000 Palestinians which has taken place since October 7. The United States - as armourer, as military protector and ally, as diplomatic protector and ally, as ideological ally - is guilty of war crimes and gross crimes against humanity, including those of ethnic cleansing and genocide, in the Gaza Strip. </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">*****</p><p><br /></p><p>Here are two impressive articles to read on this subject - at a time when the flow of information and commentary is so overwhelming, these writers help cut to more fundamental understanding.</p><p>Bashir Abu-Manneh is a senior scholar at the University of Kent, an old friend and admired colleague of mine and a fearless speaker on the condition of Palestine. Here he is interviewed by Daniel Finn, himself a prominent pro-Palestine commentator in both Britain and Ireland, in <i>Jacobin</i>:</p><h1 class="ar-mn__title" style="background-color: #fff0ee; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: red; font-family: "Lateral Condensed", "Lateral Condensed Supplement", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: -0.1em 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-war-gaza-state-terrorism-palestinian-civilians-occupation-apartheid" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.5; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Israel’s War on Gaza Is a Campaign of State Terrorism to Crush the Palestinian People</a></h1><div>John Mearsheimer, author of the magisterial <i>Tragedy of Great Power Politics</i> and most recently of <i>How States Think</i>, and senior professor in political science at the University of Chicago, greatly admired by this blog, has long been a razor-sharp and gimlet-eyed analyst of the Israel-Palestine crisis. Here he is at his own Substack blog: </div><div><br /></div><div><a class="pencraft pc-reset frontend-pencraft-Text-module__line-height-28--NgO1Q frontend-pencraft-Text-module__font-pub-headings--lbOZ2 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__size-18--zqngu frontend-pencraft-Text-module__weight-semibold--LJBj3 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__clamp--a1dYM frontend-pencraft-Text-module__clamp-3--R6uR3 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__reset--dW0zZ" data-testid="post-preview-title" href="https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 3; background-color: #f7f7f7; display: -webkit-box; font-family: var(--font-family-pub-headings); font-weight: var(--font_weight_headings_preset, 700); line-height: 28px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-decoration: unset;"><span style="font-size: large;">Death and Destruction in Gaza</span></a></div><div><br /></div><p><span> And here is Mearsheimer in conversation mostly about the same article, with Freddy Sayers of <i>UnHerd</i>:</span></p><p><a class="pencraft pc-reset frontend-pencraft-Text-module__line-height-28--NgO1Q frontend-pencraft-Text-module__font-pub-headings--lbOZ2 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__size-18--zqngu frontend-pencraft-Text-module__weight-semibold--LJBj3 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__clamp--a1dYM frontend-pencraft-Text-module__clamp-3--R6uR3 frontend-pencraft-Text-module__reset--dW0zZ" data-testid="post-preview-title" href="https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/unherd-interview-on-gaza-and-ukraine" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 3; background-color: #f7f7f7; display: -webkit-box; font-family: var(--font-family-pub-headings); font-weight: var(--font_weight_headings_preset, 700); line-height: 28px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-decoration: unset;"><span style="font-size: large;">UnHerd Interview on Gaza & Ukraine</span></a><span><br /><br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-65957684416487593902023-11-20T10:28:00.000-08:002023-11-20T13:36:59.451-08:00Irish academics and boycott - Intellectuals in the Public Sphere<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhE1Miz_ZVCeVvWfyFa20dncTy7r8BtHJX6la8ati1r69eI91RjAMJSnTl-g5UJrphbNyJpF0MlKjBhzUmnFRfV10aHHvIQi-KcVdHnk25gMwAFR7L-5tVVT9bw4TZ5Xvt0OVZLY9GnsCi2YR7hhTB4rXXDQ2MRHSKQ_Dyw6bgr5FoxzVnidNRZsiyHXuM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="881" data-original-width="1566" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhE1Miz_ZVCeVvWfyFa20dncTy7r8BtHJX6la8ati1r69eI91RjAMJSnTl-g5UJrphbNyJpF0MlKjBhzUmnFRfV10aHHvIQi-KcVdHnk25gMwAFR7L-5tVVT9bw4TZ5Xvt0OVZLY9GnsCi2YR7hhTB4rXXDQ2MRHSKQ_Dyw6bgr5FoxzVnidNRZsiyHXuM=w557-h313" width="557" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On November 4th last, the <i>Irish Times</i> published a letter organised by my colleagues and comrades at Academics for Palestine (<a href="https://academicsforpalestine.org/">Academics for Palestine – Academia Against Apartheid</a>), the Irish campaigning group which advocates for the boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education, which I helped to set up with Ronit Lentin, David Landy and Jim Roche in 2014. This letter protests at the current genocidal campaign being waged by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip, and argues that all Irish universities and colleges should immediately sever any and all ties with their Israeli counterparts. The letter as published had 633 signatories. Posted later on the website for Academics for Palestine, it has since garnered hundreds more signatures, bringing the total over 1000. Here is the letter:</span></p><p><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>We write as academics and scholars in or from Ireland. The scale and severity of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip has exceeded all previous levels of violence in the prolonged and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, according to many experts, genocidal violence. The incursion by Palestinian armed groups on 7<span style="border: 0px; bottom: 1ex; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; height: 0px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span> October included criminal attacks against civilians. But under no circumstances does international law permit the systematic bombardment and collective punishment of civilians in a besieged occupied territory.</b></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The dehumanising language and tropes widely used by Israeli leaders in reference to Palestinians echo those typically associated with genocidal incitement and intent. In the past three weeks, Israel’s military acts have matched those words, killing more than 9,000 Palestinians inside Gaza, including some 3,760 children (<a href="https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-3195-children-killed-three-weeks-surpasses-annual-number-children-killed-conflict-zones" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">more</a> than the annual number of children killed in the rest of the world’s armed conflicts combined). Many more Palestinians are dying from the lack of fuel, water, electricity and medical supplies due to the deliberate blockade. Gaza’s hospitals are barely able to function – no power for ventilators, using vinegar as antiseptic, performing surgeries without anaesthetic – and continue to be hit by Israeli airstrikes. The situation is beyond inhumane.</b></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Leading Jewish and Israeli scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies have called this ‘<a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">a textbook case of genocide</a>’. Bosnian genocide experts have likewise stated that “<a href="https://twitter.com/Rrrrnessa/status/1717553090008604705" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">what is happening in Gaza is genocide</a>”. After the first week of Israel’s onslaught, a group of more than 800 international lawyers and genocide scholars were “<a href="https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">compelled</a> to sound the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces”, while UN human rights special rapporteurs <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/gaza-un-experts-decry-bombing-hospitals-and-schools-crimes-against-humanity" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">warned</a> of “the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”, calling on all states and international organisations to fulfil their duties to prevent genocide. The killing and destruction has only escalated since then. More than 60 UN member states have now used the language of genocide to describe Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s population. This week, the South African foreign minister referenced the Rwandan genocide and “<a href="https://www.dirco.gov.za/south-africa-calls-for-international-world-to-hold-israel-accountable-for-breaches-of-international-law/" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">reminded</a> the international community not to stand idle while another genocide is unfolding”. </b></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>With the atrocities in Gaza now added to Israel’s 75 years of colonisation and occupation of Palestinian lands, there should be nothing remotely approximate to “business as usual” continuing. Many Irish universities and EU-funded research projects have active collaborations with Israeli universities. Israeli universities are, in the words of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, “major, willing and persistent <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/academic-boycott" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">accomplices</a> in Israel’s regime of occupation” and its military infrastructures. Meanwhile, several Palestinian universities in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli airstrikes, with some 70 academics and 2,000 students among the civilians killed.</b></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>We call on all universities in Ireland to immediately sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions. Those ties should be suspended until the occupation of Palestinian territory is ended, the Palestinian rights to equality and self-determination are vindicated, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return is facilitated. Anything less at this point amounts to tacit support for crimes against humanity.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Some days after the original letter was published, the <i>Irish Times</i> published a letter by other Irish academics, critical of our letter. AfP wrote to the <i>Irish Times</i> to seek to reply to this critique but our reaction was not published. It has therefore been posted on the AfP website. I post it here:</span></p><header class="entry-header" style="background-color: white; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><h1 class="entry-title" style="background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: 0px; clear: both; color: #303030; font-family: inherit; font-size: 25px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 0px -40px; outline: 0px; padding: 15px 40px; position: relative; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline; width: 720px;"><a href="https://academicsforpalestine.org/2023/11/17/academics-for-palestine-statement-on-academic-boycott-academic-freedom/" rel="bookmark" style="border: 0px; color: #303030; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">ACADEMICS FOR PALESTINE STATEMENT ON ACADEMIC BOYCOTT & ACADEMIC FREEDOM</a></h1><span class="entry-format-badge genericon genericon-standard" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background: rgb(32, 32, 32); border-radius: 50%; border: 0px; color: white; display: block; font-family: Genericons; font-size: 30px; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; height: 60px; left: -120px; line-height: 2; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; speak: none; text-align: center; text-decoration: inherit; top: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: top; width: 60px;"><span class="screen-reader-text" style="border: 0px; clip-path: inset(50%); clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px); font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: 1px; left: -1000em; margin: -1px; outline: 0px; overflow-wrap: normal; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; vertical-align: baseline; width: 1px;">Standard</span></span></header><div class="entry-content" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; counter-reset: footnotes 0; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 20px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>17th November 2023</b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>A letter organised by Academics for Palestine and signed by over 600 scholars calling on universities in Ireland to sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions was <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2023/11/04/war-in-the-gaza-strip/" rel="noreferrer noopener" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">published</a> in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Irish Times</em> on 4th November 2023. That letter remains open for signature by academics and scholars in or from Ireland via <a href="https://academicsforpalestine.org/2023/11/04/letter-to-irish-newspapers-2-november-2023/" rel="noreferrer noopener" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the Academics for Palestine website</a>, and now counts upwards of 900 signatures. </b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>In response, a small number of academics wrote to express their opposition to our call to suspend ties with Israeli institutions, and instead proposed doing nothing. </b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>They emphasised the need for dialogue with Israeli academic colleagues, but it is important to be clear that suspending institutional collaborations and complicity does not stop dialogue between scholars – there are many ways and spaces where those dialogues can and do continue to happen. </b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The responses to our letter also highlighted the need to stand with critical and dissenting scholars in Israeli universities. Those making that call are very welcome to join Academics for Palestine in the work that we are actively continuing to do on this front – such as <a href="https://academicsforpalestine.org/2023/11/03/letter-to-hebrew-university-re-prof-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian/" rel="noreferrer noopener" style="border: 0px; color: #95a5a6; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">intervening</a> in defence of scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Nurit Peled-Elhanan who have been suspended or threatened with dismissal by their own universities in Israel for voicing anti-war or anti-genocide positions. </b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The reality is that while plenty of individual scholars in Israel may not support the occupation or the siege of Gaza, at an institutional level their universities do – in a whole variety of ways. Israeli universities have joint projects with arms and weapons companies. They are heavily involved in the research and development of Israeli military security and surveillance technologies. They train personnel, advisors and lawyers for an army that has now bombed all 11 of Gaza’s universities and killed thousands of students. They hold the corpses of some Palestinians killed by occupation forces at their campus facilities. They are in some cases physically built on illegally expropriated lands in occupied Palestinian territory. And at this moment in time they are heavily engaged in the repression of Gaza solidarity positions adopted by Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian staff and students alike.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>So yes, dialogue is important, but entrenched military occupation, colonisation and siege won’t be ended by dialogue between scholars. It will require a whole range of international sanctions and pressure to support the Palestinian movements for freedom and equality. An institutional academic boycott is the one small but concrete step that we as scholars and university communities can take in that direction, and is the one thing our Palestinian colleagues have asked of us. Those who continue to object to it (especially now as the Palestinian death toll continues to mount and the effects of mass displacement and collective punishment get worse by the day) seem scarcely different from those who opposed the boycott of apartheid South Africa for its duration, before later trying to claim they had supported it all along.</b></p></div><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #656565; font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-59432485612706079742023-11-09T14:47:00.017-08:002023-11-23T14:13:30.441-08:00'History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms which shape the life of man' - Lukács in the Levant<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Today I gave a talk on Edward Said's life and work. The core of the talk was an account of Said's understanding of Georg Lukács's great essay on 'Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat', and how this essay underpinned much of Said's own 'worldly' and activist criticism. Said, like Lukács, envisaged critique as emerging most importantly in a moment of crisis - a moment of crisis where the normal 'laws' which govern or seem to govern society and economy are thrown into a new light and shown not to grasp the chaos of actuality. Further, this moment is the crux moment when the consciousness of the proletariat becomes a full 'class consciousness', and offers the potential for critique, knowledge and change.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6DgAg4LuhC1LM9QtNpL8wKhMQyQJPhTDxY8Ib1AV66hcLxj_t3SLtZPcT33bawaALKCJTVA_juPoQ-l0cWFzSiA61G0Sl1OGNtKJa-3qnSlsyZ16MPx3cnvVsaLR9kqG6kf0th2jWoR34bGOHz2lQIARE9E1eLxW7E1Ed09Q1cA2b5yHHDtHK10iKzm0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="384" height="371" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6DgAg4LuhC1LM9QtNpL8wKhMQyQJPhTDxY8Ib1AV66hcLxj_t3SLtZPcT33bawaALKCJTVA_juPoQ-l0cWFzSiA61G0Sl1OGNtKJa-3qnSlsyZ16MPx3cnvVsaLR9kqG6kf0th2jWoR34bGOHz2lQIARE9E1eLxW7E1Ed09Q1cA2b5yHHDtHK10iKzm0=w306-h371" width="306" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I argue that this Lukácsian formulation fed directly into Said's great essay 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims', where he suggests that the most powerful or fundamental knowledge of Zionism is that made by its victims, as they come to collective consciousness under its terrifying and awesome subjugation.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Thinking about this essay again today makes me believe that we can use it as a prism through which to think about Gaza. This is not complicated - it's simply the recognition that Israel's Gaza campaign is the logical endpoint of Zionism's treatment of Palestinians. The catastrophic damage wrought in Gaza shows us that the desired endpoint of Zionism is either the destruction of the Palestinians, or their being pushed out of the Strip. Genocide or murderous ethnic cleansing. A logic of elimination. Gaza brings out into the open the tremendous violence of state-Zionism, which has always been part of the creation of Israel but which has been, for extended periods at least, hidden or euphemized in forms of ideological obfuscation - socialist Zionism, the kibbutz movement, the two state solution, Camp David, the Oslo process. We must remember that all states are violent entities, even if only implicitly. Max Weber's famous definition - that the state is the agency in society which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence - tells us that all states are constituted by a centralization and unifying of certain violent agencies and the delegitimation, exclusion and elimination of all others. Those states are most successful which can conceal their violent undergirding. Israel, being an ethnic state, as argued by Oren Yiftachel, shows and has always showed its violence in its efforts to get rid of the ethnic detritus or waste or surplus which it cannot handle: non-Jews, meaning in Israel overwhelmingly Palestinian Arabs. Gaza, therefore, offers us a profound knowledge of the meaning of Zionism by bringing out into the open the core logic of Zionism, of its craving for more land and less Palestinians, its need to reify or objectify Palestinians as less than human - 'human animals' - and then to extrude or kill these wasted people, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued of the logics of contemporary capitalism. Mouin Rabbani has noted how the Israeli authorities have called their cyclical attacks on Gaza 'mowing the lawn' - a form of waste disposal or management. This is, at the moment, the best that Palestinians can hope for from Zionism.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPFjbFGeODzpWPjC2Ap4S7r7qfLwqdIW8kBM34aDuxJ8l4Qe3HH_8h7ThKLbqbs2pE6ygD53ZkvOyOp8C-K1jAA0ISZGuhyEIhsM8hoFFk0HNqJD3HL1nt46EdR8r3G261l5XZ3RZLD7IfPLhk4YbINXuf9CtfBYxL7anjypI-EWLFqFuvn4ifePuotFU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="331" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPFjbFGeODzpWPjC2Ap4S7r7qfLwqdIW8kBM34aDuxJ8l4Qe3HH_8h7ThKLbqbs2pE6ygD53ZkvOyOp8C-K1jAA0ISZGuhyEIhsM8hoFFk0HNqJD3HL1nt46EdR8r3G261l5XZ3RZLD7IfPLhk4YbINXuf9CtfBYxL7anjypI-EWLFqFuvn4ifePuotFU=w331-h331" width="331" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I am not making any very sophisticated statement. There is far too much talk, both about the Gaza crisis and about the Israel-Palestine conflict generally, which tells us that it is 'very complex', that it is morally riven, that it's hard to understand. This has always struck me as a highly problematic vision: it tells us that the situation is beyond the knowledge of most people and beyond their capacity to learn. And, as Seamus Deane wrote in another locus of late colonialism, to declare that a political problem is too complex for one to hold a clear opinion on it is 'a scandalously unintelligent position'. Actually, of course, the situation is not so complicated. A powerful first world state is stamping savagely on a largely defenceless people (and has been doing so since 1948), which does not possess a state or state apparatus, which lacks the protection of a legal jurisdiction or a security machinery, or safe borders, let alone a stable economy and an enabling and humanizing culture. It's in that sense that we can, in fact, say that what is happening in Gaza at the moment <i>is Zionism</i>, for its Palestinian victims.</span></p><p><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/death-in-the-air" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; 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line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/death-in-the-air" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 18px; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a></h2><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/death-in-the-air" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 18px; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><img alt="Death in the Air" class="c-article-card__image a-image-background" height="324" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 42.5625rem) 90vw, (max-width: 68.6875rem) 45vw, (max-width: 89.75rem) 30vw, 432px" src="https://www.versobooks.com/cdn/shop/articles/palestine.jpg?v=1699451392&width=612" srcset="//www.versobooks.com/cdn/shop/articles/palestine.jpg?v=1699451392&width=360 360w,//www.versobooks.com/cdn/shop/articles/palestine.jpg?v=1699451392&width=612 612w,//www.versobooks.com/cdn/shop/articles/palestine.jpg?v=1699451392&width=918 918w,//www.versobooks.com/cdn/shop/articles/palestine.jpg?v=1699451392 1200w
" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; aspect-ratio: 1.6 / 1; background-color: #e6e6e6; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; inline-size: 432px; max-width: 100%; object-fit: cover; object-position: center center; vertical-align: middle;" width="432" /></a></h2><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">Death in the Air</h2><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/gaza-one-month-later-an-interview-with-norman-finkelstein-and-mouin-rabbani" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 18px; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">Gaza One Month Later: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani</h2><div><br /></div></a><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/gaza-one-month-later-an-interview-with-norman-finkelstein-and-mouin-rabbani" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 18px; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/michel-warschawski-we-have-gone-beyond-war-crimes-in-gaza" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">Michel Warschawski: “We have gone beyond war crimes in Gaza.”</h2><div><br /></div></a><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/michel-warschawski-we-have-gone-beyond-war-crimes-in-gaza" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/zionists-dont-speak-for-me-on-jewish-action-for-palestinian-liberation" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">"Zionists don't speak for me": On Jewish action for Palestinian Liberation</h2><div><br /></div><div><b><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></div></a></div></div></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-35823362726386257912023-10-26T08:47:00.010-07:002023-10-26T13:07:36.183-07:00Waiting for the Barbarians<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhF0qyovQq6eXrCAzhsZEI34uLinmTu8enR1_F3TCz4gXPPjmPaaHS0034DqimHyyntRyT3MBFhgQ-_f_WoSn-HiT1yu-huY6mRDFqFsYUJ92P1_ofdqW-n_pOg9Yyd_MBcyrZZkNCexUnghR6jQZffj2fqqswRtWny3magQ6fb9YANH9yFe3RjgSAKiWk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="310" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhF0qyovQq6eXrCAzhsZEI34uLinmTu8enR1_F3TCz4gXPPjmPaaHS0034DqimHyyntRyT3MBFhgQ-_f_WoSn-HiT1yu-huY6mRDFqFsYUJ92P1_ofdqW-n_pOg9Yyd_MBcyrZZkNCexUnghR6jQZffj2fqqswRtWny3magQ6fb9YANH9yFe3RjgSAKiWk=w597-h313" width="597" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As we wait - as the 2.3 million people of Gaza wait - for the IDF's 'ground offensive' to begin, with its inevitable enormous suffering and loss of life inflicted, and its potential ethnic cleansing and genocidal effects, civil society in the Middle East and in the Atlantic West is galvanised. Petitions of writers are organised, protest marches take place, the media is alive with discussion. Governments, alas, ooze on in their nefarious, dishonest and Orwellian support for the cruelty of the powerful - Netanyahu, Macron, Biden, Sunak, Scholz among the greasiest slugs heedlessly and hypocritically trailing their slime over the international discourse. If the worst happens, and there are plenty of signs that it may, these craven and shitty politicians will have nowhere to hide. It will not be possible to say 'I didn't know' or 'If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have taken action'. What is happening and going to happen is clear - it is clear all across the Israeli political spectrum - and the time for action has actually already passed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRUSXW5nJHuKoYhcEA9-IV43IcJDixGkFSFB-dZKIpbVeM-Uz04WpF-3ft9nkIyjrY36b47tbDnxIvloOCx0qZxmS7w_OpF5pwQgnokwSsJgZkqqzQGzjmJdguKwhdoZJo64uBsmzPUckHhHI8gE7t2Cv69-J4rBL1Aqyq1Wl0qJJuBGcRncWktgA-oWQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="329" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRUSXW5nJHuKoYhcEA9-IV43IcJDixGkFSFB-dZKIpbVeM-Uz04WpF-3ft9nkIyjrY36b47tbDnxIvloOCx0qZxmS7w_OpF5pwQgnokwSsJgZkqqzQGzjmJdguKwhdoZJo64uBsmzPUckHhHI8gE7t2Cv69-J4rBL1Aqyq1Wl0qJJuBGcRncWktgA-oWQ=w588-h329" width="588" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The <i>London Review of Books</i>, awful as its Irish coverage often is, has long been a place where strong writing on Palestine was published. Veterans of this work were and are Edward Said and Judith Butler. The current issue carries excellent pieces by Adam Shatz, the brilliant Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, Amjad Iraqi and Francis Gooding.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies">Adam Shatz · Vengeful Pathologies · LRB 20 October 2023</a></span></p><p><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/eyal-weizman/exchange-rate"><span style="font-size: large;">Eyal Weizman · Exchange Rate · LRB 2 November 2023</span></a></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/amjad-iraqi/after-the-flood">Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023</a></span></p><p><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/francis-gooding/the-leaflet"><span style="font-size: large;">Francis Gooding · The Leaflet · LRB 2 November 2023</span></a></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conor</b></span></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-67889859499172236052023-10-19T05:30:00.013-07:002023-10-19T06:07:26.576-07:00Gaza: Darkness Visible<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgw8nhlKYjPxNClC_Y7011b7oR5XhtvFteeVJHr7NiRzVXTWk13pQOM1rDfG18XzujOqnyNTqJgE73rQpTMtrOloW5VPONHCau-jaBNBVTRH2HY8tWQZkDE_M5C5w_8rN8l1dIRfcLdyCCXyyepIk1SvBJned90wmgNhkzF80yhIT3qKpEtj-vLojk88L4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="299" height="339" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgw8nhlKYjPxNClC_Y7011b7oR5XhtvFteeVJHr7NiRzVXTWk13pQOM1rDfG18XzujOqnyNTqJgE73rQpTMtrOloW5VPONHCau-jaBNBVTRH2HY8tWQZkDE_M5C5w_8rN8l1dIRfcLdyCCXyyepIk1SvBJned90wmgNhkzF80yhIT3qKpEtj-vLojk88L4=w601-h339" width="601" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hi comrades</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">This posting consists just of suggested reading, though I realise that most of us now have lots of good places to go for information on Palestine and Gaza.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Bashir Abu-Manneh, brilliant Palestinian scholar at the University of Kent, and a contributing editor at <i>Jacobin</i>, explains a great deal in this superb interview/article:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><h2 class="hm-dg__title hm-sd-py__title hm-sd-b-py__title" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: "Lateral Condensed", "Lateral Condensed Supplement", sans-serif; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="hm-dg__link hm-sd-py__link hm-sd-b-py__link" href="https://jacobin.com/2023/10/gaza-war-israel-apartheid-international-solidarity-movement" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; color: red; cursor: pointer; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><span style="font-size: large;">We Must Mobilize Against the Carnage Being Inflicted on the Palestinian People</span></a></h2><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Daniel Finn, features editor at <i>Jacobin</i>, has published several excellent articles:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h3 class="hm-dg__title hm-sd-sy__title hm-sd-b-sy__title" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: "Lateral Condensed", "Lateral Condensed Supplement", sans-serif; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="hm-dg__link hm-sd-sy__link hm-sd-b-sy__link" href="https://jacobin.com/2023/10/al-ahli-hospital-bombing-gaza-war-israel-war-crimes-western-support-biden" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; color: red; cursor: pointer; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><span style="font-size: large;">Israel’s Western Backers Are Still Running Interference for Netanyahu’s War Crimes</span></a></h3></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h1 class="ar-mn__title" style="background-color: #fff0ee; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: red; font-family: "Lateral Condensed", "Lateral Condensed Supplement", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: -0.1em 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/10/israel-western-allies-bds-palestine-nonviolent-resistance-opposition" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.5; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><span style="font-size: large;">Israel’s Western Allies Have Done Everything Possible to Criminalize Nonviolent Resistance</span></a></h1></div><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The Verso site has several excellent articles on its blog:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Gideon Levy, distinguished Israeli columnist at <i>Ha'aretz</i>:</span></p><p><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/israel-can-t-imprison-two-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a></p><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/israel-can-t-imprison-two-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a></h2><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></h2><div><span style="font-size: large;"><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/israel-can-t-imprison-two-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price</h2><div><br /></div></a></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Shadi Chalesh</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/for-the-last-time-rejecting-the-conversation-between-the-sword-and-the-neck" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">For the last time: Rejecting the conversation ‘between the sword and the neck’</span></h2><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Richard Seymour</span></div></a><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/for-the-last-time-rejecting-the-conversation-between-the-sword-and-the-neck" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"></a><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-equanimity-of-lunatics" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The equanimity of lunatics</span></h2></a></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Alberto Toscano</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate</span></h2><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: black; font-size: large;"><b>Conor</b></span></div></a></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-89632750027586754632023-10-13T09:28:00.027-07:002023-11-03T09:36:06.027-07:00Eyeless in Gaza - Scattered Thoughts on the Present Crisis<p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEim5NTfalWmkLiGdyFcc7hkRY7qTKmRsotSEx2QHMkoxYz9CU5vYGJpL8W-s539e4cDZjfxP0h_nS8DzrqSt_7q49NkLNFcpoyBLQNvtgrfWHc63oyrrDQAEr-GqxkB5h1yW2wSV900MK5mA7W8RbW6-RE1SiGUFwJm4uqXHiVFOIP3PPfxhoVhNCyPMzg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="323" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEim5NTfalWmkLiGdyFcc7hkRY7qTKmRsotSEx2QHMkoxYz9CU5vYGJpL8W-s539e4cDZjfxP0h_nS8DzrqSt_7q49NkLNFcpoyBLQNvtgrfWHc63oyrrDQAEr-GqxkB5h1yW2wSV900MK5mA7W8RbW6-RE1SiGUFwJm4uqXHiVFOIP3PPfxhoVhNCyPMzg=w574-h323" width="574" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I. The State of Israel may be about to commit grave crimes against humanity - ethnic cleansing or genocide - against the people of Gaza. Warnings about this terrible and apocalyptic prospect come from sources as various as Jewish Voice for Peace, the American Middle East news site <i>Mondoweiss</i>, and the respected Palestinian politician Mustafa Bargouthi. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is the account of the Gaza Strip given by the renowned Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem. This is not up-to-the-minute, but gives essential background:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="gsc-url-top" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1e1e; display: block; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></div><p></p><div class="gsc-thumbnail-inside" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1e1e; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; text-align: justify; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><div class="gs-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0000cc; height: auto; overflow: hidden; text-decoration: none;"><a class="gs-title" data-ctorig="http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip" data-cturl="https://www.google.com/url?client=internal-element-cse&cx=016541717316011940128:jusxewrypgq&q=http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi8x-rKzfOBAxW_Y0EAHbtJDnkQFnoECAEQAg&usg=AOvVaw0luAfVkHLXVMzI8IuSB7CZ" dir="ltr" href="https://www.google.com/url?client=internal-element-cse&cx=016541717316011940128:jusxewrypgq&q=http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi8x-rKzfOBAxW_Y0EAHbtJDnkQFnoECAEQAg&usg=AOvVaw0luAfVkHLXVMzI8IuSB7CZ" style="background-color: rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.05); border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 51, 80); border-bottom-style: none !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom: 1px none rgb(0, 51, 80); box-sizing: border-box; color: #003350; cursor: pointer; display: inline; height: auto; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 200ms ease 0s;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">The <b style="border-bottom: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #003350; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Gaza</b> Strip | B'Tselem</span></a></div></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And here is a video lecture by Sara Roy, a brilliant scholar of Gaza:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><a data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtxY-ZqNiMNE&usg=AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l" data-ved="2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtxY-ZqNiMNE&usg=AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l&opi=89978449" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; outline: 0px;"></a></span></p><div class="notranslate TbwUpd NJjxre iUh30 ojE3Fb" style="align-items: center; display: flex; font-size: 12px; left: 0px; line-height: 1.3; padding: 0px; position: absolute; text-size-adjust: none; top: 0px;"><a data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtxY-ZqNiMNE&usg=AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l" data-ved="2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjYz4jdzvOBAxUhUkEAHXgMDzwQtwJ6BAgtEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtxY-ZqNiMNE&usg=AOvVaw0DlRARoBBflNcLrhe6Lv9l&opi=89978449" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; outline: 0px;"><span class="H9lube" style="align-items: center; background-color: #f1f3f4; border-radius: 50%; border: 1px solid rgb(236, 237, 239); display: inline-flex; height: 26px; justify-content: center; margin-right: 12px; vertical-align: middle; width: 26px;"></span></a></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txY-ZqNiMNE&t=654s&ab_channel=OxfordBrookesAlumni">(220) Gaza: When is life grievable? Personal reflections on decades of research in Palestine by Sara Roy - YouTube</a></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is Dutch scholar Sai Englert on the impending threat of genocide: </span></p><p><a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/impending-genocide"><span style="font-size: medium;">Sai Englert, Impending Genocide — Sidecar (newleftreview.org)</span></a></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">II. Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but committing crimes against humanity against the civilian population of a territory of which Israel is the occupier is not a mode of self-defence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">III. Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but they very rarely talk about the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, and the right of an occupied population to resistance, including armed resistance.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">IV. Many commentators make much of Hamas, according to its charter, being 'sworn to Israel's destruction', as a BBC website puts it. There are a couple of things to say about this. First, while it is true that Hamas sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy, it must be recognised that it has done very little to achieve this alleged aim. This is because it is incapable of doing much, militarily, to achieve this aim. Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades constitute a popular resistance militia, or 'terrorist group'. But nothing in this militia's military capacity could bring about Israel's demise. On the other hand, while Israel may not be 'sworn to destroy' the Palestinian people', in some explicitly articulated doctrine, it is equipped with every modern weapon which such a task might require, and it has done a very great deal to scatter, dispossess, expel, break and destroy the Palestinian people, from 1947 to this day. What is more important - a political-ideological document, or the 'facts on the ground'? The facts on the ground suggest that Israeli policy is driven by the intention to ruin the Palestinian nation in every way possible - political and military but also economic, cultural, legal and social. This is what should be our focus, not the Hamas charter.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">V. In <i>Terrorism and the Ethics of War </i>(2010), Stephen Nathanson argues that condemnation of terrorism is really only credible when combined with sincere. unbiased and consistent opposition to the targeting of the innocent, no matter the identity of the killers or the victims, and no matter the cause. This puts most of the condemnation of Hamas we've been hearing or reading in the non-credible category.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">VI. Those who demand of Palestine activists that before any other discussion of the Gaza crisis can take place, they condemn Hamas, need to be challenged as to their adhering to the tenets in IV above. Where were these blowhards, when the opportunity was presented to condemn the treatment of Gaza over the last 15 years? Where were these blowhards when Israelis murdered or lynched hundreds of Palestinians in the last year? The fact is that the display of moral outrage comes very cheap, and it is always more about virtue signalling and anti-intellectual self-pleasuring than any real thought or understanding. It nearly always is unrelated to a real connection to the people or situation in whose interest it is apparently deployed - indeed, it stands in for and occludes such a connection.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">VII. Defenders of Israel who ask Palestine activists not to endlessly have recourse to the past to justify their positions need to cop themselves on and remember the Holocaust.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">VIII. Liberals who tell us that violence is committed by 'both sides' need to remember that what we are observing in reality is a rich first-world state, with an economy predicated on advanced technology, with one of the most formidable military apparatuses in the world, which is armed with unacknowledged nuclear weapons, crushing a people without a state, without a standing army or airforce or navy, a people impoverished, scattered and abused, denied most of its rights, dispossessed of its homeland, and armed only with rifles, shoulder-held grenade-launchers and crude unguided rockets of the most limited effectiveness. The 'conflict' is not one of equals, and never has been. As Frantz Fanon once suggested, the native knows that Western 'objectivity' will always be used against him.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">IX. In the actions it has taken since the weekend, and in the actions it seems about to take, Israel has enjoyed almost total support from 'the international community' - that is, from the United States and its European allies, including Britain, Germany and France. If ethnic cleansing or genocide are committed by Israel, those other countries will be complicit in these crimes against humanity. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">X. Israel removed its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2005, in a unilateral 'disengagement' plan led by Ariel Sharon's government. But Israel has constructed a security fence around the entire Strip (other than along the Egyptian border), and it controls the airspace and the coastline. Israel controls all food supplies, medical supplies, fuel, and electricity for Gaza. Dov Weisglass, a former adviser to the Israeli government, suggested in 2006 of the regulation of produce allowed into Gaza that 'the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger'. An Israeli report, compiled in 2008, but repressed by the government until 2012, revealed that calculations had been made of the calorific intake Gazans needed to avoid starvation and malnutrition. Yet Israel, precisely because of this extraordinary amount of control of the Strip, and in spite of the 'disengagement', remains in international law the occupying power. An occupying power has, in fact, a duty of care to the civilian population under its control. Reducing that population to a condition of 'bare life', in Giorgio Agamben's famous term, is a crime against humanity.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">XI. Returning to V. above, when challenged to 'condemn Hamas', one needs to pause and think. What exactly is at stake in such a demand? What lies behind it? What does the person making the demand hope to achieve by it? It seems to me to be a very particular kind of rhetorical-ideological manoeuvre. Firstly, in any discussion or debate, to make a forcible demand of one's interlocutor is to demand control of the discussion. Second, it is implicit in the demand that the person to whom it is made will be reduced, weakened, arm-twisted, by both the request and the problem of reacting to it, whether or not a 'condemnation' is issued. Third, the language of 'condemnation' is a moral or ethical language, not a political language, and so the demand seeks to shift the ground of discussion from politics to morality. Fourth, the demand is present-ist: it seeks to strip a concrete human and political situation of any of the wider frameworks which help to constitute that situation. Implicit in the demand is the idea that trying to think or learn any kind of background or context, any kind of establishing historical narrative, is irrelevant or even, of course, immoral. To talk of the past or of context is, apparently, to indulge in 'whataboutery', or, as the historians call it, counterfactual speculation. The point, though, is that one party to a purported discussion, in issuing the demand to 'condemn Hamas', is arrogating to themselves the right to police that discussion. And it is incorrect to suggest that seeking knowledge about an action amounts to justifying that action - indeed, a proper 'condemnation' of an action requires a full understanding of what that action was and where it came from.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The overall conclusion one comes to, then, is that the demand to 'condemn Hamas' is more a matter of form than of content. The claim of the person making the demand to be concerned about the situation in Israel or the situation in Gaza, is fictional. The demand is made as a debating point; it is not made from or even seeking to take up, a coherent moral position. The demand should, therefore, be refused.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is Judith Butler, in the <i>London Review of Books</i>, saying similar things to me, but saying them better:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><h2 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #fafaf7; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #494746; font-family: Quadraat, TimesNewRoman, "Times New Roman", Times, Baskerville, Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 30px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.166em; margin: 0px 0px 1px; outline: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a class="js-trackedModule--item-title" href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning" style="background-color: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #17639f; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.2s ease 0s, border-color 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline; will-change: color, border-color;">The Compass of Mourning</a></h2><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And Frédéric Lordon, also:</span></div><div><br /></div><div><a class="c-article-card__link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/totalitarian-catalysis" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 18px; gap: 21px; outline: none; text-decoration: inherit; transition-duration: 0.15s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);"><h2 class="c-article-card__title" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; border: 0px solid; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Headline", "Tiempos Text", "Iowan Old Style", "Apple Garamond", Baskerville, "Times New Roman", "Droid Serif", Times, "Source Serif Pro", serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: clamp(1.25rem, -0.226rem + 4.7244vw, 2rem); font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px;">Totalitarian catalysis</h2></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Conor</b></span></div><p><br /></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-51964589898169679792023-09-25T08:38:00.022-07:002023-10-05T14:43:49.256-07:00"What is critical consciousness, if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?" - Remembering Edward Said<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Twenty years ago today, Edward Said finally succumbed to the leukaemia he had so bravely battled for the previous decade. His early death - he was only 67 - was greeted with sadness and dismay by his allies and friends, and no doubt with a grim glee by his enemies. I can still remember getting the news by phone from a scholar friend, and feeling that the world would never be quite the same again.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I've spent much of my adult life reading Said, and, I hope, learning from him. I first became aware of him as a third year undergraduate, when I heard about this book of his called <i>Orientalism</i>, which was represented to me as the greatest Foucauldian book by someone other than Foucault. This was long before the internet or Amazon or other modes of rapid access to books, and my first copy of <i>Orientalism</i> was brought to me by a friend and former teacher from Minneapolis. Now I would say that <i>Orientalism</i> is only superficially a Foucauldian book, but one's knowledge - one's critical consciousness - has to begin somewhere.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjXK5qLkRYbSBp7ZTGPFQ5gHFkIJ0HwZFnk4y-MxdRJ_GrY7Mb7eRoCk1L_QjNZeRQPPHstIC4dgCFEZPz97vRoqT92qBaSulwIeHfKsZWZCQmUx6Gst9UDeqN1Q-bjypIZT9f92O6W5ZD-ue1kB1j4yZR60LN_EL4Gc6wNkCu6xS2g6WT3fa7ZYB943vM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="1667" height="457" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjXK5qLkRYbSBp7ZTGPFQ5gHFkIJ0HwZFnk4y-MxdRJ_GrY7Mb7eRoCk1L_QjNZeRQPPHstIC4dgCFEZPz97vRoqT92qBaSulwIeHfKsZWZCQmUx6Gst9UDeqN1Q-bjypIZT9f92O6W5ZD-ue1kB1j4yZR60LN_EL4Gc6wNkCu6xS2g6WT3fa7ZYB943vM=w559-h457" width="559" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A year or so later, I took a Master's degree at University College Dublin, and began to read Said properly. I was very fortunate that teaching me on that MA programme was a trio of brilliant and important scholars - Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd and Thomas Docherty - who took criticism very seriously, and who thought with rigour and intelligence about what it meant to be, or to try to be, an intellectual. Not merely this but Deane and Kiberd had been crucial to the mediation into Irish literary studies of what we then called 'postcolonial theory': Kiberd, after all, had invited Said to the Yeats Summer School in 1986, and Deane had published the resulting talk as a Field Day pamphlet in 1988. In those days, this 'theory' mostly consisted still in the work of Said and Spivak and Bhabha - postcolonial studies was still something relatively new and radical in the Irish academy and it was not yet a full orthodoxy elsewhere in the Anglophone world. I gravitated to Said most of all - not only because his writing, while never simplistic, avoided the extraordinary obscurantism and neologisms with which the Indian critics larded their discourse, but I also was excited by the sense that, of the three, Said was most clearly an intellectual, an activist-writer who reached and addressed much wider audiences than those of the seminar room.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I read <i>Orientalism</i> with Kiberd, and immediately was compelled by it - the erudition, the wonderful readings it contains (those of French writers such as Nerval and Lamartine and Flaubert in particular), its polemical verve and urgency. I could see, too, how the discourse of 'Orientalism' could be compared fruitfully to that of 'Celticism': that body of colonial themes and ideas which suffused much writing in and about Ireland in the nineteenth century, and which could be politicized by English figures such as Arnold and Froude, and their Irish antagonists such as Yeats and Synge. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But I also independently was reading the book which I now consider superior to <i>Orientalism</i>, and to be Said's masterpiece: <i>The World, the Text, and the Critic</i>. <i>The World</i>, as I'll call it, is a collection of essays Said published between 1969 and 1982, and it's mostly concerned with the politics of intellectuals in the academy. If <i>Orientalism's</i> scandalous success was partly attributable to its steely intervention in the realm of European and American ideas and policy in the Middle East, <i>The World</i> turned its critical weapons on Said's own institution - the university and the discourse of critique. Part of what was so exciting about these essays - 'Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism', 'Travelling Theory', 'Reflections on American "Left" Literary Criticism' - was that Said could write convincingly about the then-new and vogue-ish poststructuralist scholars in the ascendant in America and Britain - Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes - while showing himself to be equally comfortable with the themes and ideas of the New Criticism and, even more, the great tradition of Romance philology, whose legatee he could justly claim to be. This was the world of Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Karl Vossler and Ernst Robert Curtius, extraordinary scholars who helped in the early twentieth-century to invent modern comparative literature. Furtheremore, Said was also imbued with ideas taken from the greatest names of Western Marxism - Lukács and Gramsci - and these in particular helped him work out his devastating readings of the ever-widening gulf between the radical rhetoric of the 'New New Criticism', and its actual and dreary institutionalization and self-reification in journals, curricula, conferences and departments. Said could notice all of this, and call powerfully for what he called a 'worldly' criticism, which was, and is, a criticism which is aware of the relationship between the classroom and the street, and seeks to bridge it and analyze it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhO8PehuMTUOmR22882tvITXWACG4p7TK7hwBS3MuuYVGEP7XxAArgldIkFdob57la6snxX7Wyqa8O0GBvgZ3OugtO1sUa_TZ-Bynz4-7bOen5jY-M294sTkJ6uI3XZp_clB9sXhYAkXkEaK-BSLCxRrM_1lR38PTz7jGrfRBh-8U0Zk54OLznd6Ls1vvY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhO8PehuMTUOmR22882tvITXWACG4p7TK7hwBS3MuuYVGEP7XxAArgldIkFdob57la6snxX7Wyqa8O0GBvgZ3OugtO1sUa_TZ-Bynz4-7bOen5jY-M294sTkJ6uI3XZp_clB9sXhYAkXkEaK-BSLCxRrM_1lR38PTz7jGrfRBh-8U0Zk54OLznd6Ls1vvY=w548-h308" width="548" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I should admit that it took me a while to grasp fully the implications of this work of Said's, and that I initially read him in a rather instrumental and callow way - when I wanted to investigate Foucault's ideas but recoiled from the difficulty of some of his texts, I turned to Said for a handy gloss. When I wanted to understand Gramsci, I turned to Said for a handy gloss. I would find my interest in cultural geography fired up by his spatialized criticism in <i>Culture and Imperialism</i>, and my reading of Adorno was stimulated by his lucid readings of the Western classical music tradition in <i>Musical Elaborations</i>. Later, of course, I came to realise that Said was always a heterodox Foucauldian, that his geography was insufficiently grounded in the material realities of capital, that his reading of Adorno was arguably incomplete. But I always went back to Said's work and read it again, each time learning a little more, each time maybe understanding it a bit more, and gradually allowing it its own integrity and heuristic power. Said was berated so often by putative allies for being insufficiently Foucauldian or Marxist or, indeed, humanistic, that one came to long for due attention to be paid to the constructive and innovative and <i>effective</i> things he did and thought <i>with</i> Foucault or Lukács or Adorno or Auerbach, and his capacity to conjugate them together. Equally peculiarly, such critique still continues in some quarters, making one wonder just what is at stake in such repetitive polemics. Somehow, Said's putatively sympathetic critics need at once to possess him and to renounce and apparently transcend him and his work. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I became familiar with some of the developing literature about Said's work. I learned from Abdirahman Hussein's splendid reading of the whole <i>oeuvre</i>. I thrilled to Paul Bové's appropriation of Said in his magnificent<i> Intellectuals in Power</i>. I winced at Aijaz Ahmad's withering and doctrinaire critique in <i>In Theory</i>. It dawned on me that Said was, in fact, not a Marxist or a post-structuralist - he'd never toe the line that Ahmad demanded or that Robert Young demanded. Rather, Said was a radicalized humanist, who had realised with Gaston Bachelard that a humanism that did not press itself up to its own limits was not worthy of the name. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigMPMjg2a1qTn1i3viBAvA3vx_Xv-NP-WhUS66FN4MJQzUiIYjM3zJHvtKHzlfN5XgLhcPCX6_i-Ydt18PHqtXk3NlI-LT3d5bEyGy_DPckwa9n-IbfvhFDjHB_jGkc2PcnTkqiXfkp_YRjtd1tbwsH_vj_ljjpo_Y57AzeMIoRbIV3d60Q7SKQxuQVQU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1148" data-original-width="820" height="590" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigMPMjg2a1qTn1i3viBAvA3vx_Xv-NP-WhUS66FN4MJQzUiIYjM3zJHvtKHzlfN5XgLhcPCX6_i-Ydt18PHqtXk3NlI-LT3d5bEyGy_DPckwa9n-IbfvhFDjHB_jGkc2PcnTkqiXfkp_YRjtd1tbwsH_vj_ljjpo_Y57AzeMIoRbIV3d60Q7SKQxuQVQU=w420-h590" width="420" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It took me a while to read Said's first book, on a writer who obsessed him throughout his life, and who happens to be one of my own favourites - Joseph Conrad. It took me a while, too, to read Said on Palestine: I read the literary criticism long before I read <i>After the Last Sky</i> or <i>The Question of Palestine</i>. I realised immediately, though, how he had brilliantly deployed the weapons he'd acquired as a critic in his political writing - 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims', a major chapter of <i>The Question of Palestine,</i> has to be one of the most impressive instances of the 'worldly' criticism Said advocated so passionately. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Timothy Brennan's biography of Said, <i>Places of Mind</i>, portrayed a fiercely engaged and active life. Reception of the book has not been without controversy - with such a subject, how could it be otherwise? - but I enjoyed it very much. I might have wished for a little more of the private man - someone who clearly lived, felt, acted, argued so intensely, right up to his very last hours, could only be fascinating and intriguing. I myself met Said on a few occasions but could not properly claim to be a friend of his. But his brilliance, warmth, and, in spite of the big ego, his interest in the people around him, no matter their high prestige or complete lack of importance - these were immediately obvious, and wonderful and admirable traits. The world is, as many said at the time of Said's death, a quieter, dimmer, less interesting place without him. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For a while after the death, I wondered what we, what I, could do without Said in the world. And then, with colleagues and friends, and with all due modesty, I realised that the best way to honour his memory was to try to do similar or proximate or affiliated work, and to try to think my way to my own positions as he, autodidact in the style of Vico that he was, had sought to do.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiN-iUbi3H9n1RdhL_cnLQrdbJWiGQvO-b2BVRWOlB7WLlR6foArTl8nhR9BpDEeNRcmJFAHC9aSBreleBWrH3X2SF5eWAHKkbfw0n9du0mM6N3d0qa3bJ5lwFCr-b1-bEHXvIKYHYURN8RWV-OaGR1vcl1fTlF7uvYI6mNYJTE9M35Vvwth52qEKqAubE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2176" data-original-width="2157" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiN-iUbi3H9n1RdhL_cnLQrdbJWiGQvO-b2BVRWOlB7WLlR6foArTl8nhR9BpDEeNRcmJFAHC9aSBreleBWrH3X2SF5eWAHKkbfw0n9du0mM6N3d0qa3bJ5lwFCr-b1-bEHXvIKYHYURN8RWV-OaGR1vcl1fTlF7uvYI6mNYJTE9M35Vvwth52qEKqAubE=w406-h409" width="406" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To help with the task of remembering Said today, I am posting five pieces here. Two are my own - my review of Tim Brennan's biography, in the <i>Dublin Review of Books,</i> and an essay commissioned by Dan Finn at <i>Jacobin</i> on Said's worldly intellectual performance. The third article is the excellent and intelligent review of <i>Places of Mind</i> in the <i>Boston Review</i>, by Esmat Elhalaby. The last two articles are the wonderful and heartfelt obituaries by Alexander Cockburn at <i>CounterPunch</i> (which never fails to make me emotional), and Michael Wood at the <i>London Review of Books</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My <i>DRB</i> review of<i> Places of Mind</i>: </span></p><h3 class="entry-title td-module-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, "times new roman", Times, serif; font-size: 41px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 50px; margin: 0px 0px 7px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://drb.ie/articles/intellectual-insurrection/" rel="bookmark" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Intellectual Insurrection">Intellectual Insurrection</a></h3><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My <i>Jacobin</i> essay:</span></p><h3 class="hm-dg__title hm-sd-sy__title hm-sd-a-sy__title" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Antwerp, serif; font-size: 23px; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><a class="hm-dg__link hm-sd-sy__link hm-sd-a-sy__link" href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/edward-said-intellectuals-activism-academia-palestine-politics" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Edward Said Showed Intellectuals How to Bring Politics to Their Work</span></b></a></h3><div><br /></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Elhalaby's review of <i>Places of Mind</i>:</span></p><p><br /></p><h3 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default" style="background-color: #fafafa; box-sizing: border-box; color: var( --e-global-color-c37b961 ); font-family: var( --e-global-typography-2fcb51c-font-family ),Sans-serif; letter-spacing: -1.5px; line-height: 1.2em; margin-block: 0.5rem 1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-world-of-edward-said/" style="background-color: transparent; box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The World of Edward Said</span></a></h3><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Michael Wood at the <i>LRB</i>:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #fafaf7; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #494746; font-family: Quadraat, TimesNewRoman, "Times New Roman", Times, Baskerville, Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 30px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.166em; margin-bottom: 2px !important; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 4px; margin: 4px 0px 2px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwikv6KAysuBAxWQXUEAHQrVANoQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv25%2Fn20%2Fmichael-wood%2Fon-edward-said&usg=AOvVaw0V0h1vleLF0ldKO5dipzQa&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw0V0h1vleLF0ldKO5dipzQa" data-ved="2ahUKEwikv6KAysuBAxWQXUEAHQrVANoQFnoECBcQAQ" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwikv6KAysuBAxWQXUEAHQrVANoQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv25%2Fn20%2Fmichael-wood%2Fon-edward-said&usg=AOvVaw0V0h1vleLF0ldKO5dipzQa&opi=89978449" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-weight: 400; outline: 0px;"></a></h3><div><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #fafaf7; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Quadraat, TimesNewRoman, "Times New Roman", Times, Baskerville, Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 30px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.166em; margin-bottom: 2px !important; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 4px; margin: 4px 0px 2px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a class="js-trackedModule--item-title" href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n20/michael-wood/on-edward-said" style="background-color: transparent; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.2s ease 0s, border-color 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline; will-change: color, border-color;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-weight: inherit;"> </span><span class="highlight-term" style="background-color: #b6d2e9; border-radius: 3px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px 1px; text-wrap: nowrap; vertical-align: baseline;">Edward Said</span></span></a></h3></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And Alex Cockburn at <i>Counterpunch</i>:</span></p><div><a data-ctbtn="2" data-cthref="/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiwnouxkcaBAxXySkEAHTCUBYIQFnoECA8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.counterpunch.org%2F2003%2F09%2F25%2Fedward-said-a-mighty-and-passionate-heart%2F&usg=AOvVaw1WhZ3ouMurfB4loaZq2Bp9&opi=89978449" data-jrwt="1" data-jsarwt="1" data-usg="AOvVaw1WhZ3ouMurfB4loaZq2Bp9" data-ved="2ahUKEwiwnouxkcaBAxXySkEAHTCUBYIQFnoECA8QAQ" href="https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiwnouxkcaBAxXySkEAHTCUBYIQFnoECA8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.counterpunch.org%2F2003%2F09%2F25%2Fedward-said-a-mighty-and-passionate-heart%2F&usg=AOvVaw1WhZ3ouMurfB4loaZq2Bp9&opi=89978449" jsaction="rcuQ6b:npT2md" jscontroller="M9mgyc" jsname="UWckNb" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; font-family: arial, sans-serif; outline: 0px;"><h3 class="LC20lb MBeuO DKV0Md" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.3; margin: 18px 0px 3px; padding: 5px 0px 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate Heart</span></h3></a></div><div><b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Conor</span><br /></b><p><br /></p></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-55646117881181215272023-08-24T14:11:00.005-07:002023-08-27T08:49:49.834-07:00"Discipline In War Counts More Than Fury" - Learning From Victory at Maynooth<p><span style="font-size: medium;">On Tuesday morning, the Governing Authority of Maynooth University met in emergency session, to discuss its planned change in the way staff members of GA are to be chosen, from election (which has been the <i>status quo</i>) to selection by private consultants. This plan was a tributary outcome of the Government's 2022 Higher Education Authority Act, which shrinks 'governing authorities' to a maximum headcount of 19, and fixes a permanent non-university majority of members at 10. Faced with a letter from the Irish Federation of University Teachers rejecting this measure out of hand, with letters from international scholars in support of their Maynooth colleagues, and with the results of a petition organised by IFUT which had accumulated over 1160 signatures in a couple of weeks, GA voted to accept the current arrangement, to reject a 'hybrid' model which had been proposed (three to be elected, two selected), and to reverse its original proposal for the selection of all five members.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This victory has been achieved by the redoubtable and brave work of the IFUT Maynooth local, by IFUT staff and members more generally and by the support of a large network of Irish and international scholars and other persons interested in the future of Maynooth, of higher education in Ireland, and indeed of higher education and academic freedom everywhere. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghrsjLTSsofXO7y-c5r4LzGNJR89UoKZ1B9NZd12WuFrQkBFo-Ag-Z1ocaUs07NsxFZZ-SlLY0uJqJfWILmnxHn6RrMoK4XY1395U7vzjf3M8_zw4C75O6VB3xfDnUoQ2-_0daDo5cP_GXWXhRRAN5zOcPzBttlG07hpwTKxc5qusCmVzuFgIc9kLvOdI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="220" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghrsjLTSsofXO7y-c5r4LzGNJR89UoKZ1B9NZd12WuFrQkBFo-Ag-Z1ocaUs07NsxFZZ-SlLY0uJqJfWILmnxHn6RrMoK4XY1395U7vzjf3M8_zw4C75O6VB3xfDnUoQ2-_0daDo5cP_GXWXhRRAN5zOcPzBttlG07hpwTKxc5qusCmVzuFgIc9kLvOdI=w331-h360" width="331" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A victory, yes, but while one wishes to see the University work harmoniously after a period of tension, we who have fought for this achievement must not drop our guard. We must never underestimate the forces arrayed against us. Those forces will rally and return. The victory achieved is one which does not wipe away many other problems at Maynooth or at Irish universities generally - commercialisation, the whole vacuous rhetoric of 'excellence', the mushrooming of often unaccountable management, the hegemonic re-purposing and use of 'radical' ideas and language to achieve undemocratic and empty ends ('equality, diversity and inclusiveness', top-down, management-led 'decolonisation' of curricula, the by-passing of departmental and disciplinary structures and democratic forms by the creation of 'schools', and much more).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDce4i58d0895D5a8upEwO9qdQ3kTdk9X9iae-2Rt8A84_ofjwPYweakpEulx5_RIuEqNIpda9xSTDr273TtT4p2xdyWkC8UTylhSzoNH47cWIgrabuhSR1-_WghK8HtEL0creq3bjBv1l6EAI8bcRzI-eAiV9EV4kd2w1tDB9J0UdmNQn7IDBJCu1mWE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3576" data-original-width="2783" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDce4i58d0895D5a8upEwO9qdQ3kTdk9X9iae-2Rt8A84_ofjwPYweakpEulx5_RIuEqNIpda9xSTDr273TtT4p2xdyWkC8UTylhSzoNH47cWIgrabuhSR1-_WghK8HtEL0creq3bjBv1l6EAI8bcRzI-eAiV9EV4kd2w1tDB9J0UdmNQn7IDBJCu1mWE=w284-h364" width="284" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We in Maynooth are deeply grateful to our comrades in Ireland and abroad for their support. But we also have much to learn, as we strategize for the struggle which undoubtedly will continue. We have much to learn from the crisis of public universities in the United States and from the struggles produced by the British Brown Report 'reforms'. Even as we in Maynooth celebrate a victory today, Brighton University's management is seeking to eviscerate many of that institution's programmes and is cutting staff by 10%. Compulsory redundancies wantonly axe careers, destroy departments, and wreck the learning opportunities of students. All of these tactics may yet come to Maynooth. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There will be much talk in Maynooth about the need now to put aside differences and work in the belief that 'we' all have the University's interests at heart. But we do not all have the same interests at heart. Management is concerned with students, teaching, and research only as 'inputs' and 'outcomes'. It is in the thrall of a profoundly reified conception of learning and pedagogy. It has no sense of the intellectual vocation, of the value of critique and dissent, and of education as a public good.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Maynooth staff and students have achieved a fine victory. But we must remember that the moment of victory is that of the preparation for the next war, and we must plan accordingly.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-46384599206280674492023-08-22T06:29:00.015-07:002023-08-24T02:48:07.337-07:00The Future Will Only Contain What We Put Into It Now - the Maynooth crisis continues<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMopvceTQLOZiLT3-N8yOt9D6Km2M9RfxAayjOqsb5zdoC3Px3rVwCuhzq98DN3ERTxma9Dd7WJzUlDTJvZPofeJEHLtRIFLP30h0gtQyeEqUzxRYY3dnGVmRSIqa3xfknv2188M_4owayriiIo9ewuLurldtoYqnVNdgyDuV-Vms0O9aNye3QZhfclmE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="119" data-original-width="424" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMopvceTQLOZiLT3-N8yOt9D6Km2M9RfxAayjOqsb5zdoC3Px3rVwCuhzq98DN3ERTxma9Dd7WJzUlDTJvZPofeJEHLtRIFLP30h0gtQyeEqUzxRYY3dnGVmRSIqa3xfknv2188M_4owayriiIo9ewuLurldtoYqnVNdgyDuV-Vms0O9aNye3QZhfclmE=w616-h173" width="616" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Aontacht</i> is the website of <i>Irish Student Left Online</i>. Aontacht is a non-sectarian media collective of left-populist character, which seeks to challenge Irish society from the viewpoint of political parties, trades unions, tenants' organisations, student groups and workers' interest groups. It welcomes contributions, video and media contributions coming from a revolutionary socialist perspective.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Maynooth activists Steph Collins and Naoise McManus have published an extremely valuable article on the Maynooth crisis. Collins and McManus are socialists and both are members of Students For Change at Maynooth. Their article brilliantly outlines not only the current constitutional crisis at Maynooth - epitomized by the drive to appoint staff members to Governing Authority by private selection, rather than by democratic election - but offers a deeper history of the rise of neoliberal managerialism at Maynooth. They also offer important background on the recently appointed President of Maynooth University, who is clearly the crucial and most ruthless driver of this process and of the wider process now underway of the bureaucratisation and commercialisation of Maynooth. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is Steph and Naoise's superb article: </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><h2 class="entry-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Rubik; font-size: 30px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 45px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://aontachtmedia.ie/2023/08/20/maynooth-university-systematically-excludes-staff-from-key-decisions-in-trend-towards-commercialisation/" rel="bookmark" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; line-height: 45px; margin-top: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s linear 0s;">Maynooth University “Systematically Excludes” Staff From Key Decisions in Trend Towards Commercialisation</a></h2><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTP2prHU0alWIawGNAu7C0JcE43AJGmJ008VpbaiBDWVGpbl9P39cybI9uOv3gIeTGlBlJLJwFxCDT31Yl6MqnivY9fm1W_hBkr4vrjbz_enhL9p3iZOf-8FXUojux8YhF8014YOhLaXzqA0toZ66PG4EbA86FlGCL0WAVy9r9H0RvIJ-nQuKcswXrvEk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="277" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTP2prHU0alWIawGNAu7C0JcE43AJGmJ008VpbaiBDWVGpbl9P39cybI9uOv3gIeTGlBlJLJwFxCDT31Yl6MqnivY9fm1W_hBkr4vrjbz_enhL9p3iZOf-8FXUojux8YhF8014YOhLaXzqA0toZ66PG4EbA86FlGCL0WAVy9r9H0RvIJ-nQuKcswXrvEk=w409-h268" width="409" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>It Is Forbidden To Forbid</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Part of what is most sad and unfortunate, as well as infuriating and frustrating, about this current situation is that there are plainly staff - senior and maybe not so senior - at Maynooth University who consider that a good sharp dose of neoliberalism and the 'New Public Management' is what Maynooth 'needs'. Otherwise, the current increasingly authoritarian and aggressive - and deeply anti-intellectual and anti-pedagogical - regime would never have been set up, the current spate of largely untransparent and barely accountable senior managerial appointments would not be taking place, and the bizarre and Orwellian 'Strategic Plan' would not have been created largely over the heads of staff, students and their contributions.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhfup4_Zxq785DvSIrmoQz5crVr3xhC9yCcWReVpBtmAQUA1ItDuEyalcPU07QFq1FQTESMSpYH5hFwxedSgPtE1Vvh2mnZ7shXqcLSywtpbuFzChsxvOIAarxAIZQTvayQf2gIUFSBBxnLRczr4ipCUngwzUr7Y5Z0m5NCUvzXOhzhAy5kA6sn08kRAuc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="806" data-original-width="1200" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhfup4_Zxq785DvSIrmoQz5crVr3xhC9yCcWReVpBtmAQUA1ItDuEyalcPU07QFq1FQTESMSpYH5hFwxedSgPtE1Vvh2mnZ7shXqcLSywtpbuFzChsxvOIAarxAIZQTvayQf2gIUFSBBxnLRczr4ipCUngwzUr7Y5Z0m5NCUvzXOhzhAy5kA6sn08kRAuc=w619-h416" width="619" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Students often have a much clearer and more profound sense of what the commercialisation of higher education looks and feels like than their teachers and supervisors. Academics should listen, and co-operate with their student comrades. We have universities, education and the future to protect.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-17323728752590631682023-08-03T08:35:00.008-07:002023-08-14T02:49:59.045-07:00The Wolf at the Door - Democracy Threatened at Maynooth University<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Comrades -</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For a long time, it seemed that Maynooth University enjoyed a degree of shelter from the chill winds of managerialism and commercialism which have eviscerated so much of what is good in the British and American university systems. In truth, various pressures have been encroaching on Maynooth, its staff, its students, its facilities, for a couple of decades but these things were hidden or cushioned by the expansion created in the Celtic Tiger years. Now, especially in the wake of the global pandemic, there is no mistaking the threats. A beast approaches. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi3NoxJjkLXDhZBfvMbLcq1MC1chd0WlQdI4C592VBidd6ew2HsgyzEAF3_yTSVakOZakqE61v7VeXko6b6t9MMsHnAYlNPjKRAI48kUA1E1qYb_rtVdrHKiy4jpHIA_A8oryZSJueXnEgXbWR8Upqhp66k7QKl9wQTrZcVFuKSjQLzG8LzInUMHSAhDmY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="360" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi3NoxJjkLXDhZBfvMbLcq1MC1chd0WlQdI4C592VBidd6ew2HsgyzEAF3_yTSVakOZakqE61v7VeXko6b6t9MMsHnAYlNPjKRAI48kUA1E1qYb_rtVdrHKiy4jpHIA_A8oryZSJueXnEgXbWR8Upqhp66k7QKl9wQTrZcVFuKSjQLzG8LzInUMHSAhDmY=w288-h364" width="288" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The beast comes in various forms. It comes in the form of an ever-greater stress on digital and electronic education, modes of teaching, learning and teaching environments. It comes in the form of a highly aggressive top-down managerial style which the senior administration is content to deploy in all interactions with staff. And it comes in the form of the cynical corruption and arrogant avoidance of Maynooth's legally constituted systems of governance by that senior administration. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The immediate context is current government legislation, promulgated by Simon Harris, Minister for Higher Education, which seeks, <i>inter alia</i>, to shrink the 'governing authorities' of Irish universities, and to fix a structural majority on those governing authorities of non-university members. In Maynooth specifically, the situation is massively worsened by the existing administration which wishes to abolish the electoral process by which staff have hitherto democratically chosen the university representatives on Governing Authority. Staff members are instead to be selected by (no doubt handsomely paid and utterly unnecessary) outside private consultants. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What the senior administration of Maynooth University is doing, in pushing forward this harshly anti-democratic policy, is destroying one of the fundamental pillars of what constitutes Maynooth University and any proper university. That pillar is the principle of self-governance. The original medieval universities were groups of scholars, with collective legal rights protected by charter, and independent of both secular and ecclesiastical power. This too is the root of academic freedom - in 1155, the University of Bologna issued its <i>Constitutio Habita</i>, which guaranteed a scholar unimpeded passage in the interests of scholarship and pedagogy. The senior administration of Maynooth is tearing up these rights, and is casually and ignorantly gutting the institution's status as a university. Maynooth is well advanced on the road to being what Bill Readings called a 'university in ruins'.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVQZZPaZipcqAZ3t94ldL29YIg_ZZ3LffxFKdZie_8iV8IbC2lc1W-pN_eTRgfFRafCME0gKntQ50-9AHs59_pcx5RajCpbtGIMoZL3cpgDlpTejtU_m8Ce1p9lNdpC_Q8mN1MII8zg3lYFtTdfa3wF6zqJ7aqj5jLXCVLVaKO3DO33XTl7aWqe2804e4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2018" data-original-width="4485" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVQZZPaZipcqAZ3t94ldL29YIg_ZZ3LffxFKdZie_8iV8IbC2lc1W-pN_eTRgfFRafCME0gKntQ50-9AHs59_pcx5RajCpbtGIMoZL3cpgDlpTejtU_m8Ce1p9lNdpC_Q8mN1MII8zg3lYFtTdfa3wF6zqJ7aqj5jLXCVLVaKO3DO33XTl7aWqe2804e4=w506-h228" width="506" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is a superb blogpost by my comrade and friend, and the Head of the Maynooth English Department, Conrad Brunstrom, on this crisis: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><h2 style="background-color: #f9efcb; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.1em; margin: 0px 0px 0px 131px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://conradbrunstrom.wordpress.com/2023/08/03/representative-governance-at-maynooth-please-read-and-sign/" rel="bookmark" style="color: #4265a7; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Permanent Link to Representative Governance at Maynooth. Please read and sign."><span style="font-size: large;">Representative Governance at Maynooth. Please read and sign.</span></a></h2><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Conrad urges readers to sign the petition organised in defence of Maynooth's vestiges of democratic self-governance. Here is the link to the petition. Please sign it and please pass it on as widely as possible. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><a href="https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/defend-democracy-at-maynooth-university" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: #f9efcb; color: #4265a7; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/defend-democracy-at-maynooth-university</span></a></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Conor</b></span></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-12351456527558719082023-07-30T03:11:00.012-07:002023-07-30T08:50:38.059-07:00The Wars on Palestine <p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Some years ago, at a conference on Palestine at Columbia University in Manhattan, through my friend Bashir Abu-Manneh, I met the leading Palestinian historian now active. Rashid Khalidi, the holder of the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a powerhouse of scholarship, courage and intellectual energy. At the end-of-conference party where Bashir introduced us, Rashid told me of his interest in Ireland and Irish history. And indeed the parallels and connections between Ireland and Palestine are striking: shared histories of British control, of partition, of forms of colonialism. Shared histories, also, of late-colonial war and of dissent. These connections have been studied by writers as different as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ian Lustick and Joe Cleary. The recent death of former Lord Mayor of Dublin Ben Briscoe reminds us that Irish political sympathies have not always run in favour of the Palestinians - Briscoe's father presided over the visit to Dublin in the 1930s of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant intellectual father of Revisionist (rightwing) Zionism, who came to meet De Valera. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjK1bQPbVkeTixaFrhOO0zctrNPMsVlxJaKd6WjsD9PS1IoA-RFGj9dq3oQI2e4dedIZwqFW2glV05sLSqQDXANrKqDonJspkKPPoq3GoDr6tuYcPzFAslQPiTB5q0iW8SyRV8y9odzJX2dyqMiU78NuVEx1pILiBoRPc1-XsBAaYAwuVjNpd-nI0BscHI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="483" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjK1bQPbVkeTixaFrhOO0zctrNPMsVlxJaKd6WjsD9PS1IoA-RFGj9dq3oQI2e4dedIZwqFW2glV05sLSqQDXANrKqDonJspkKPPoq3GoDr6tuYcPzFAslQPiTB5q0iW8SyRV8y9odzJX2dyqMiU78NuVEx1pILiBoRPc1-XsBAaYAwuVjNpd-nI0BscHI=w483-h483" width="483" /></span></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">These various links and points of comparison have received thus far piecemeal scholarly treatment. But Rashid Khalidi is intent on giving them extended attention. On several visits to Dublin - one last year as a visiting fellow at Trinity College's Long Room Hub - he has set himself the task of getting into the necessary archival research to push forward this project. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Khalidi was in Dublin again last May, and we organised for him to speak at Maynooth University. His chosen topic was 'The Hundred Years War on Palestine'. This is the title of his 2020 book, a very fine history of the attacks on Palestine which began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Introducing Rashid to a Maynooth audience on May 22 last, I felt it was impossible not to mention the fact that we were meeting only 8 days after the date of the 'Declaration of Independence' of Israel, and in the broader historical context of the commemoration of the Nakba, which really began in March 1948. Indeed, I noted, May 22 was the 75th anniversary of the Tantura massacre, when up to 200 Palestinian civilians were murdered by members of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah at a village south of Haifa. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj2WvnQwFPGk0vY9CJJ6e6iVg6I8KdHXUuCTKyv-4Npz2W1V8pJlZJBB1XLLnzebJxyncjqAoqZ8SRuOU-jkQNGTsK0ujLowV6FxqA9BTK5jQttGpQtBzjTfyyPgmfqm7Aagn77fP56LYcHcqf5qVFGbMRZ1ZgYED1Y9ha76dzkSrEnbyKdBeJCloUexnM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj2WvnQwFPGk0vY9CJJ6e6iVg6I8KdHXUuCTKyv-4Npz2W1V8pJlZJBB1XLLnzebJxyncjqAoqZ8SRuOU-jkQNGTsK0ujLowV6FxqA9BTK5jQttGpQtBzjTfyyPgmfqm7Aagn77fP56LYcHcqf5qVFGbMRZ1ZgYED1Y9ha76dzkSrEnbyKdBeJCloUexnM=w517-h345" width="517" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Rashid gave a wide-ranging talk, summarizing his book but ranging beyond it and bringing his analysis of the continuing war on Palestine up to date. Stressing the fact that Zionism needs to be understood as a settler-colonial project, and not just a Jewish nationalism, and stressing also the continuous, direct and crucial involvement of the great powers in the assault on Palestine from 1917 to the present, the talk offered a superb capsule account of the situation in Palestine and of the potential for resistance.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I have written a short essay recounting Rashid's talk, for the <i>Dublin Review of Books</i>. My warm thanks are due to Maurice Earls for making this possible, and also I am indebted to Eve Patten of Trinity College Dublin, who hosted Rashid's visits to Trinity. And of course I am indebted to Rashid for his combination of grit and intelligence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is the DRB article: </span></p><h3 class="entry-title td-module-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, "times new roman", Times, serif; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://drb.ie/the-wars-on-palestine/" rel="bookmark" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="The Wars on Palestine"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Wars on Palestine</span></a></h3><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Conor</b></span></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-47950404647259476972023-07-02T03:22:00.007-07:002023-07-09T15:46:52.113-07:00Shit Hits Fans - RTE finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> In the last week, RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, has imploded in public in the most spectacular manner. Revelations of secret payments to its 'top' 'star' presenter, the inexplicable and irritating Ryan Tubridy, have peeled open a wider process of corruption and incompetence in governance, programme making, contracts, treatment of most employees, use of public funding and so on. Hopefully, at least, Tubridy is gone forever - bad cess to him. Other 'stars' - the equally inexplicable and loathsome Joe Duffy (to think that such a conservative old fart could be let loose making programmes about James Connolly is to encounter the moral idiocy of much RTE thinking), the competent Claire Byrne, the middle-aged animate Barbie that is Miriam 'Genuinely' O'Callaghan, the loutish and greasy-haired Brendan O'Connor - have all made self-regarding and self-exculpating statements about their bloated and unjustified salaries. Even worse but entirely characteristically, they have been allowed at least in Duffy's and Byrne's cases to use their programmes as platforms to make such statements, in ghastly displays of lachrymose narcissism. What an enormous fuck-up.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Nothing is worse than someone saying 'I told you so'. I am not a media scholar or expert. I am not saying 'I told you so'. But, in 2014 and in 2019, I wrote two blog pieces on RTE radio which I think touch on a couple of the issues now suffering the glaring examination of the Irish public. The first of these pieces has always been the most-read article on this blog. Both articles are now, of course, dated, but the points they make may still have some value.</span></p><p><br /></p><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">(first published in June 2014)</span></div><div class="post-header" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3720407023756786861" itemprop="description articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 570px;"><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I am a habitual, and at times avid, radio listener. I have no television. I grew up without one, and while I've lived at certain phases of my life with a TV in my home, I am much happier without one. Putting the matter baldly, on the basis of what I hear talked of, and from the occasional perusal of published schedules, I am fairly convinced that most TV is rubbish: the enormous amount of propaganda/tabloid news, endless sports coverage, live shows, game shows - all of this mulch seems to me to outweigh the good things on television: the occasional good investigative programme, the occasional good film, the occasional good wildlife or nature documentary. My fear with TV is partly, of course, that it caters to my worst, laziest, most vulnerable susceptibilities - television catches its watcher at his weakest, demands his total attention, and wastes his time. I would be worried if I had a television that I'd spend a lot of time watching precisely the garbage I have listed above, always in the endlessly-deferred hope that I might come upon an instance of the better programming content. I'd never read anything again, and, the Lord knows, I am a slow enough, and inefficient enough, reader as things stand.<br /><br />But I do listen to the radio. I have a radio in several rooms of my apartment. I wake up with the radio. I listen to it as I drive. I cook or clean my flat (not frequently enough, admittedly) to the strains of the radio. At least I can do that. Of course, it must be admitted immediately that I am still listening to a rather narrow range of channels, and I don't make much effort to discriminate or plan my listening. So I mostly end up listening to daytime 'talk radio': here in Dublin, for me, this means RTE Radio 1, and Newstalk106. It's about RTE Radio 1 that I wish to write here.<br /><br />RTE is a small national broadcaster in a small country. It has never adopted whole-heartedly the Reithian model of its huge and powerful neighbour and rival, the BBC. I presume the assumption has always been made by Irish governments that the Irish population's license fee payments were never going to be enough to pay for the funding of an 'adequate' service on their own. Consequently, RTE's radio and TV activities are funded by a mixture of the license fee, and advertising on both radio and television. And consequently the chances of RTE ever finding space for a television channel like the old BBC 2 - which when I was a child in the Seventies was a by-word for good arts coverage, interesting film programming, thoughtful drama, and educational programming linked to the often-superb Open University - were always slim. RTE does have a music station which might be said to model itself to some degree on BBC Radio 3, though one old friend has suggested that the apt comparison is to Classic FM. This is RTE Lyric. Lyric, however, suffers from some of the problems I am going to list in regard to RTE Radio 1 below.<br /><br />RTE Radio 1 ought to be the Irish equivalent of BBC Radio 4, which must still be one of the best talk-radio stations in the world. It's not that I believe everything that the BBC news services tell me: I don't, of course. But Radio 4 makes great efforts to cover news issues with serious depth and sometimes with real rigour. It features higher-brow discussion programmes covering the arts and the intellectual world, such as Andrew Marr's 'Start the Week', and Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. It features a good deal of literature read on air, fiction or non-fiction. It features regular drama, as well as its very own soap, the eternal <i>Archers</i>. Unfortunately, running with the BBC analogy, RTE Radio 1 is more like an unhappy composite of BBC Radio 4 and Radio 2. Even during the 'Tiger' years, when advertising funding was not hard to come by, RTE Radio 1 had become ever-more conservative, limited, homogenous, and the crash has only accentuated those tendencies. I am going to proceed here through the elements of this radio station which I think are execrable. Some of these will seem trivial: so be it.<br /><br />RTE, as a colleague pointed out to me a few years ago, no longer <i>makes</i> radio programmes. All radio is live, or is recorded and presented as if in one take. The vast bulk of programming is in what I will call 'magazine' format, where there is a single anchor, who introduces topics, interviews persons who appear on the programme, and in a sense regulates the whole production, albeit with the unheard input of a producer. Radio 1 starts off with an early morning light music programme, 'Risin' Time'. That dropped 'g' is enough to wake me up shouting at the radio already. Then we have a two hour news programme, Morning Ireland. This is followed by John Murray's 'light' magazine, and then Sean O'Rourke's 'news' magazine. Then we have another light music programme with Ronan Collins. Then we get one of the worst programmes in the entire schedule, Liveline, with Joe Duffy. Last week, when airtravel to parts of Europe was affected by a strike by French air-traffic controllers, at least three days were given on this programme to various non-entities moaning and blathering about the immensity of their suffering while waiting two hours at Charles de Gaulle, all encouraged by the lugubrious Duffy, a bloated overpaid excuse for the popular touch. Then at 3pm, we have Derek Mooney's light afternoon magazine, given to hyperventilation about how one can win 'Mooney's Money', and, given Mooney's background with a short and sweet nature programme some years ago, sometimes lightened by the adventures of an enterprising hedgehog or two. Hedgehogs have more charisma than Mary Wilson, who presents Drivetime, a news magazine until 6.30. We then have a sports magazine. And then there follows an arts programme, Arena, presented by Sean Rocks, which gives every appearance of being a live magazine. This programme recently established its cultural credentials very firmly by reporting at some several minutes' length on the death of Peaches Geldof, an unhappy and uninteresting celebrity, while missing the death of Peter Matthiessen, a major American writer of the last 50 years. At 8.30pm, we have a slightly more interesting light music programme, presented mostly by John Creedon. At 10pm on 3 days a week in the political season (that is, when the Houses of the Oireachtas are in session), there is something called 'The Late Debate', which is always announced, portentously, as coming to us from 'RTE News and Current Affairs' - as if that made any difference. In summertime, this slot is filled by repeats, when RTE joyfully tells us that we now have 'another chance to listen to' a programme we wish we'd never heard in the first place. Then we get a late sports report, a reading from a book 'of the week', and we go to a late-night light music programme, presented on weekdays by Alf McCarthy, (possessor of one of the most grating accents, and one of the irritatingly ingratiating manners, on Irish radio) and on weekends, by Lillian Smyth.<br /><br />And that's how it is, five days a week, Monday to Friday, every day. Weekends are not much better; at this time of year, they are often worse. Saturdays and Sundays start with a kind of graveyard shift, of programmes that might have some individual character but low listenership: a rural news magazine called 'Countrywide' on Saturday mornings, followed by a 'playback' selection of the week's listening (whose function seems mostly to be to display how uninteresting much of the week's broadcasting has been). On Sunday mornings, we get a set of (actually pre-recorded) pieces, 'World Report' at 8am (the very location of this programme in the schedules is final confirmation, if any were needed, that RTE's news and cultural horizons are grossly foreshortened), followed at 8.30 by John Bowman's selection from RTE's archives, and then at 9am, 'Sunday Miscellany' - a venerable programme whose name goes to point up the fact that the content of the entire schedule is eclectic to the point of incoherence. On Saturdays at 10am, we get a business news magazine, 'The Business', now presented by Richard Curran. On Sundays, we get a magazine/chat programme at that time presented by Miriam O'Callaghan. At 11am on both Saturdays and Sundays, we get 'Marian Finucane', another live magazine, which covers both serious and trivial matters. On Saturdays in the political season, we get 'Saturday with Claire Byrne', a roundtable discussion. On Sundays, we get 'This Week', one of the better news programmes, with prerecorded interviews, and relatively in-depth treatment of news stories. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we get long live sports coverage programmes. Exorbitantly, on Saturdays in high summer when the GAA championships are in train, 'Saturday Sport' may run from 2pm until 9pm, blotting out much of one of the two remaining spaces for programmes of any particular character or slightly narrower interest. For the fact is that it is only on Saturday and Sunday nights that one finds anything like 'niche' or properly interested specific radio programmes - coverage of books and book reviews, a programme on history, and Donncha O Dulaing's extraordinary time-warp programme from a pre-Lemass Ireland (I see now that O'Dulaing is not presenting his programme at the moment, and if he has quit altogether - he has been ill in recent times - an epoch will have passed in Irish broadcasting. His programmes (most famously<i> Highways</i><i> and Byways</i>, back in the 1970s) were notable chiefly for their attempts at audio-sepia, but he also has one of the nicest and most euphonious voices on Irish radio, and he'll be missed). Other matters on Saturday and Sunday evenings include a programme specializing in live ceilidh music, RTE's one drama-per-week, and Philip King's excellent selection of popular and folk music, albeit presented in a rather ludicrously precious and hushed manner. Such programmes all can be swept away, in the earlier part of Saturday evenings, by the apparently intensely-felt need for the entire nation to listen to some middle-grade football or hurling game.<br /><br />And that's it. There are many many faults with this set-up. Where to begin?<br /><br />When her weekend radio programmes were being instituted, I heard Marian Finucane saying on the radio that listeners had been saying that they wanted the weekends to be more like the weekdays, in regard to listening. Well, these listeners must be happy in their benighted condition, because that is what they got. RTE Radio 1 is characterised overall and specifically by an extraordinary blandness and homogeneity of style, tone, vocabulary, programming technique and structure, ideological positioning, cultural vision. It is resolutely middle-brow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive, largely uninteresting, unimaginative, without depth or heft, without context, mostly without thought. It's like Weetabix - it fills up a lot of space but is almost weightless. RTE Radio 1: Reader's Digest radio at its best or worst.<br /><br />The sameness comes primarily from the magazine format. The magazine format has certain advantages: it is flexible (it can cut to breaking news immediately), it is omniverous (it can tackle light and heavy issues). But, being live, it is also constructed on the cusp of the moment, its time for preparation is minimal, its time for thought or the canvassing of a range of ideas or opinions is almost non-existent, and it seems to conduce to the production of 'stars' - 'Marian', 'Joe', 'Sean', 'Mooney', 'Gerry' and 'Gaybo'. Even now, after the crash, these stars are mostly grossly over-paid - the idea that Joe Duffy is paid several hundred thousand euros per annum for his purportedly sympathetic grunts and moans down the phone to his interlocutors is peculiarly offensive. Old age has revealed Gay Byrne to be a pompous and condescending stuffed shirt, and with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that, presenting the 'Late Late Show', he must have been one of the most conservative laureates of 'the Sixties' in any country anywhere. Gerry Ryan was his successor, and his broadcasting persona - at once warm, funny, crass, capable of both delicate interview and rampaging vulgarity - was only matched in its homologous relationship to the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland by the ghastly manner of the unfortunate man's sudden end.<br /><br />The extraordinarily narrow range of opinion on RTE Radio 1 is most obvious on programmes like Marian Finucane's Sunday morning discussion of the newspapers. Apart from the fact that creating a programme which is largely parasitic on another media form is itself indicative of the braindead nature of RTE broadcasting, one notes the same people turning up again, and again, and again. Figures such as the Russian neoliberal economist, Constantin Gurdjiev, or Ken Murphy of the Law Society, or David Horgan of Petrol Resources could make a living from whatever their fees from RTE are, alone. The typical selection of people consists of a Gurdjiev or Horgan, a political correspondent, a TD (sometimes a Minister), and one other person who may be well-known from some civil society activity. And this pattern of selection will appear on other programmes: on Sean O'Rourke's 'Gathering' on Fridays (now apparently an institution in itself and referred to as if with a capital 'g'), on 'Saturday with Claire Byrne' and on 'The Late Debate' - same people, same kinds of people, same pattern, perennially the same discussion.<br /><br />One's discontent with this format is only enhanced when one realises that a great deal of the discussion that takes place is essentially ill-informed or only partially-informed bar-stool banter. Ludicrous ideologues such as former Fine Gael Wicklow councilor Susan Philips, who has made a whole new career out of Islamophobia and wannabe-neoconservative attitudinizing, or Hazhir Teimourian, a Kurdish journalist of perfervidly pro-Western tendencies, are brought blandly onto RTE Radio 1 as 'Middle East experts', without a scintilla of critical inspection. Or we often get Declan Power, a deeply conservative 'security analyist', whose background is never given but whose opinions are accepted by RTE anchors with dumbstruck deference. The idea that these programmes lead to great rigour of discussion and penetrating insight - if it applies in RTE's thinking at all - is sadly mistaken.<br /><br />But the extraordinary centrism of opinion is also evident. Leftwing voices get very little space. Admittedly, Ireland does not have that many leftwing journalists or academics, but a few exist: they are canvassed for opinion on such programmes only infrequently. This is most evident in the way that economists working for companies or corporations working in the financial sector - Jim Power, of FriendsFirst is a good example - are wheeled on for commentary, without much thought that their ideas might come with a particular angle. This paucity of properly radical or imaginative economic analysis on RTE means that the station did not cover itself in any great interpretative glory during the financial crash. Individual figures such as George Lee were well aware of the problems in the Irish economy and in the state's finances, and issued warnings, but would never have offered an analysis or policy prognosis other than that of austerity. This means that RTE is mostly a vehicle for versions of neoliberal TINAism - 'There is no alternative'. There's none coming out of Montrose, to be sure, but then one remembers that RTE tends to think that south Dublin is the centre of the universe.<br /><br />The sheer vapidity of much of this programming is evident in much more trivial ways, also. The poverty of thought in regard to programme names, for example: 'The John Murray Show', 'The Ronan Collins Show', 'The Mooney Show', 'The Book Show', 'The History Show', 'The Miriam O'Callaghan Show', 'The Marian Finucane Show'. Endless 'shows' hung around and predicated on a 'personality'. This latter might be acceptable if the 'personality' was interesting or fertile or productive - perhaps in the manner that for a few years Vincent Browne was. But most RTE presenters seem to come from the same bland stable, while also being encouraged, by the very format in which they are working, to see themselves as 'stars' or celebrities, the kind of people who were paid large sums in the Tiger years to allow themselves fake-tanned reification in magazines like <i>VIP</i>.<br /><br />RTE Radio 1 documentaries - 'The Doc on One': RTE occasionally strives for a cool or streetwise tone, and usually ends up sounding ridiculous - are limited also. Most obviously, they seem to get no funding at all, and therefore programmes commonly seem to consist of one man or woman with a tape recorder, who interviews a number of people on some human interest topic, and splices the interviews together to produce a pre-recorded 'documentary'. But the programme's pre-recorded nature seems to have little influence on the ideas or thought of such broadcasts, seems not to induce the documentary makers to bring in other opinion on the given topic or event. The idea of using the documentary form to explore social or political issues in a structural manner, or to explore any content of faintly intellectual interest, seems to be largely absent. Such programmes, then, are 'documentaries' only in the thinnest and most basic sense.<br /><br />RTE Radio 1 seems to shelter some truly extraordinary and often repellent accents. Mostly, these accents are those of female broadcasters and journalists: Emma McNamara (a business correspondent who must be able to boast the most attenuated 'o' on the Irish airwaves), Kate Egan (an over-elocuted newsreader), and brassy-voiced veterans such as Miriam O'Callaghan and Keelin Shanley. This is leaving aside the ghastly mixture of Dublin 4 and 'DART' accents on display on 'AA Roadwatch', a non-RTE production of news information on commuting, which wins all the prizes for the ugliest, most ungrammatical, inaccurate speech discourse on Irish radio. Endlessly, everyday, we are told about 'delays southbound on the M1', for example, as if the Belfast to Dublin highway were populated by mobile impedimenta of some sort; or that 'things are heavy both ways' on the Blackrock to Merrion Gates main road into south Dublin. Endlessly, placenames are mispronounced - my pet hate is the way that AA Roadwatch seems to think that Foster Avenue in South Dublin is in fact 'Foster's Avenue', as if Dublin streetnames were in the gift of Australian brewing companies. It is 'things' of this sort that account for the damage to my smallest radio, which routinely gets knocked off my desk or kitchen counter when I am getting mad as hell and don't want to take any more.<br /><br />A reader here may say, reasonably enough, Well, Conor, why don't you just turn the radio off? And indeed I could do that. But I like listening, and soon I am going to be paying for this sort of muck, whether my radio is on or off. Minister (hopefully soon to be ex-Minister) Pat Rabbitte will shortly bring in a replacement for the Television License (which infuriating advertisements on radio currently tell me 'makes quality programming possible'). This charge will be applied to every householder in the state, on the basis that with computers, iphones and other forms of media technology I could be watching RTE television (even if I am not and never want to). In other words, the current government is planning effectively to license all media-capable technologies. It's in this light, that this current angry screed is justified.</span><br /></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;"><a href="https://reflectionsfromdamagedlife.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-rte-radio-1-is-more-awful-than-ever.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;">Why RTE Radio 1 Is More Awful Than Ever</a></h3><div><br /></div><div>(published in May 2019)</div><div class="post-header" style="line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8967946616281816916" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 570px;"><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on">Five years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled 'Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful'. It has been, by a long way, the most read post on this blog, outdistancing any musings on books or inflammatory writings about Palestine. Even the bots of the Donbas or West Virginia seem to enjoy it. Here it is:<br /><br /><div class="K3JSBVB-F-k" style="background-color: #ffffcc; border: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-overflow: ellipsis; text-wrap: nowrap; vertical-align: baseline; width: 220px;"><a href="http://reflectionsfromdamagedlife.blogspot.com/2014/06/why-rte-radio-1-is-so-awful.html" style="border: 0px; color: #00838f; cursor: pointer; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful</a></div><br />Since then, I have not stopped listening to Radio 1. I switch back and forth between it and Newstalk106. Both stations annoy me, but it's RTE Radio 1 which benefits from the license fee which I have not as yet paid - not possessing a TV - but which, no doubt, I soon will have to pay, just to guard against the outside possibility that I'd someday be stupid enough to want to watch 'The Late Late Show' on the smartphone I don't have. Because Radio 1 stands as the 'radio station of record' of Ireland, in the manner of the <i>Irish Times</i> in the print media, I resent its dreary and often asinine character.<br /><br />My irritable and scornful analysis of Radio 1 still has currency. It probably says a lot that the station's character has not changed one iota since April 2014. Some presenters have gone, some new ones have arrived. None are, of themselves, worth listening to. Some, by virtue of the extraordinarily fixed pattern of the station's schedule, acquire or have acquired 'importance'. None of them deserve it.<br /><br />For my money, the only broadcaster worth making an effort to listen to in Ireland these days is Sean Moncrieff, who presents an afternoon programme on Newstalk, Monday to Friday, between 2pm and 4pm. Moncrieff, with a background in stand-up comedy and a training in philosophy, manages to present a programme which steers between those poles, often to striking effect. He can be drily, or vulgarly, funny. He clearly improvises at least part of his <i>spiel</i>. He has real range in his interviews, which mostly tend towards the light, but not always. Moncrieff can cut to the heart of a topic, be it a serious cultural matter or some scrap from popular news, with a combination of steeliness and sympathy, which leaves most of his competitors standing. He is (of course) supported by an able and creative production team, but this does not take away from his own wit, articulacy and mental agility. He is vastly more interesting to listen to than Ray Darcy, his rival in the same slot on RTE Radio 1, and he's vastly more interesting than most of his Newstalk colleagues - the callous Paul Williams, the breathlessly conceited Pat Kenny, the crassly philistine Ivan Yates who seems never to have advanced in his capacity for speech beyond the Terrible Twos, or the bizarrely-accented Susan Cahill, who gushes in the same way over various writers every Sunday.<br /><br />But RTE Radio 1 has no one of Moncrieff's wit, insight or sure touch. RTE Radio 1 is stale. As a friend pointed out to me a while ago, the problem with Marian Finucane is that she is getting old, and her programme and its arrangement are getting old. In fact they were all old when the damn progamme was created. The whole RTE Radio 1 structure is old, and it needs a kick in the arse. Alas, when you produce, or collude in the production of, 'star' presenters, such people then expand to fill the fetishized space that has been allotted to them. It's beyond comprehension that RTE (or anywhere else) would pay a superannuated fogey like Ryan Tubridy nearly half a million euros per annum to do the 'work' he does. I don't understand or see his 'talent'. His voice is hard to bear, his wit is flat, and his morning radio programme is almost entirely without interest.<br /><br />I feel sorry in summertime for Dave Fanning - a major Irish broadcaster, with substantial cultural achievements to his name in the promotion and development of rock music (even if I differ with him about U2) - who often 'stands in for Ryan', while 'Ryan' takes the long holidays written into his disgraceful contract. Years ago, someone said that the two best Irish radio broadcasters were Fanning, and Tommy O'Brien. They both had very distinctive voices and fields of interest and expertise. Fanning still has these things; O'Brien, sadly, died in 1988. Fanning who has a very distinctive radio voice, radio patter, and angle on the world, is much much better than Tubridy, but presumably has not been able to negotiate the kind of ludicrous contract with RTE that the younger and less talented man has, and so he takes gigs like this one. <br /><br />Tommy O'Brien was the kind of real original figure which RTE now almost entirely lacks. He owned a huge collection of records of classical music, particularly grand opera, and he presented a weekly radio programme on Radio 1, always opened with his greeting 'Good evenin', listeners', in a strong south Tipp accent. He possessed great knowledge, was passionate about his subject, but was entirely lacking in pretension. Not everyone might agree with his taste, but his extraordinary individuality was undeniable. Compared to him, a Tubridy is merely a buffoon, and a Cathal Murray is a soogey-moogey saccharine dummy who would make watching a game of tiddly-winks seem exciting.<br /><br />Tubridy's 'talent', as I say, is lost on me. I don't see what he brings to his programmes that a smart young journalist, well trained in radio and with an able production team, could not do for a tenth of the cost. RTE tells us that if it doesn't pay bloated marionettes like Tubridy or Finucane or Miriam 'Genewwwwoyyynely' O'Callaghan or Joe Duffy commensurately bloated pay packets, it will 'lose' them. Well and good. Fine. So be it - lose the lot of them, and give us radio with some content, and less of the <i>faux </i>charisma which is the real content of so much of the drivel we are asked to listen to.<br /><br />The same vapidity pertains to programme content, as ever. Now that we are moving towards the summer season, the 10pm slot on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays on Radio 1 is vulnerable to even more dross than usual. We have had in recent times a gamut of female journalists anchoring 'The Late Debate' - the typically useless RTE magazine with a few talking heads. We now have repeats on three successive nights of 50 years of 'Sunday Miscellany'. 'Sunday Miscellany' is a vintage programme, but it is hardly the kind of totem of Western civilization which RTE plainly thinks it is. <i>It does not warrant repeats</i> - five decades of middlebrow ruminations do not bear much repetition. And, to add insult to injury, we are always told we are being 'given another chance' to listen to these programmes, as if we are unregenerate brats who are resistant to the dreary nostrums of our elders and betters and now are being given one last chance to simper properly and suck it all up. If this is what RTE thinks of its listeners, then it really is on its last legs.<br /><br /><b>Conor</b></div></div></span></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-60708208183068933382023-04-11T05:26:00.007-07:002023-05-02T07:50:09.552-07:00Las mujeres dan valor - Remembering Rachel Corrie<div><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0Wap_zfjcXgdd16KXTt5afBNKnQZvxOtx_PYiJMOVZnFDDxg5CJN7PPCsvEr3n7fu0EfaahNHkcRhnL-7096FTR8CvUJ3PaFPn3PJY-dLnahmC_2x5NMuqRV3ORs6yI0aQCi6g3anclyXToo9ZFd9Fn-1-o6l2HnEB56uCstUOvnZgSnbmOjzS9XY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="273" height="504" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0Wap_zfjcXgdd16KXTt5afBNKnQZvxOtx_PYiJMOVZnFDDxg5CJN7PPCsvEr3n7fu0EfaahNHkcRhnL-7096FTR8CvUJ3PaFPn3PJY-dLnahmC_2x5NMuqRV3ORs6yI0aQCi6g3anclyXToo9ZFd9Fn-1-o6l2HnEB56uCstUOvnZgSnbmOjzS9XY=w378-h504" width="378" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Yesterday, April 10, was the birthday of Rachel Corrie. Corrie, a 23-year old American from Olympia, in the state of Washington, was murdered by the driver/operator of a D9 Caterpillar bulldozer, in the town of Rafah, on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, on March 16, 2003. Corrie was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, and had that day been taking part in protests seeking to prevent the illegal destruction of the home of the Nasrallah family. Corrie and her colleagues stood in front of the bulldozers. Corrie was pushed under the pile of earth gathered by one 'dozer, and then run over. Her spine was shattered and she suffered from multiple injuries to her ribcage and lungs. Terrible but vital photographs taken at the time show Rachel's young body, bent and contorted in her death agony, an image from Goya's 'Disasters of War'. Twenty minutes later, she was dead.</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghs6tOH8kVei_9dysvHRQ_oKVJhgG6PVIZLkI68sxk6jDD6EEfQOPoyGkfwF8TXUXwPA0KfHX8ZozyoBcLVK4s7j-_AdgAhs-bYW3I4a9KfUR6zS4NktUbaTwGtZFKeu_UuJBbKGhcZRObGsQueOGlfv1CdwtjGMOy40w5mWtD5XqFTdrQWv1mN4d1/s258/LasMujeresDanValor.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="195" data-original-width="258" height="477" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghs6tOH8kVei_9dysvHRQ_oKVJhgG6PVIZLkI68sxk6jDD6EEfQOPoyGkfwF8TXUXwPA0KfHX8ZozyoBcLVK4s7j-_AdgAhs-bYW3I4a9KfUR6zS4NktUbaTwGtZFKeu_UuJBbKGhcZRObGsQueOGlfv1CdwtjGMOy40w5mWtD5XqFTdrQWv1mN4d1/w632-h477/LasMujeresDanValor.jpg" width="632" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Israel and the Israeli Defence Forces have always denied responsibility for the killing of Rachel. Cases taken by the Corrie family to the Israeli Supreme Court have been thrown out - 'the most moral army in the world' could not possibly have wilfully murdered an unarmed youthful female civilian. But even the United States has shown, via political and diplomatic channels, some soft scepticism at the lies and hypocrisy propagated by Israel's bankrupt political and judicial system. </span></div></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Had she lived, Rachel Corrie would have turned 43 yesterday. Her courage, at the limit and to the very end, stands as a beacon for the rest of us, as Israel reveals ever more openly the Gorgon face of its racism, its hollow moralism and ruthlessness.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Here is a blogpost I made in March 2016:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://reflectionsfromdamagedlife.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-meaning-of-moral-courage.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">The meaning of moral courage - remembering Rachel Corrie</span></a></h3></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">And here is a strong article in the London <i>Independent</i>: </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a data-ved="2ahUKEwjP5Ie756H-AhXNQkEAHUY-BBkQFnoECA8QAQ" href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rachel-corrie-death-parents-gaza-idf-b2303078.html" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rachel-corrie-death-parents-gaza-idf-b2303078.html&ved=2ahUKEwjP5Ie756H-AhXNQkEAHUY-BBkQFnoECA8QAQ" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); background-color: white; color: #1a0dab; outline: 0px;"><h3 class="LC20lb MBeuO DKV0Md" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.3; margin: 18px 0px 3px; padding: 5px 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza by the IDF. 20 years ...</span></h3></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Conor</span></b></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-61707395006868493962023-03-07T14:23:00.007-08:002023-04-12T06:37:37.276-07:00The Dark Side of Enlightenment - A Century of the Institut fur Sozialforschung <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYLa2lVATrfEKdPlNycjvZT4qomR6OfmLdXYJ2tlBu-6A_7LRFGpYoECnFkHOREUlanap6FYGjkhtA1xP6DXkTYErKPH2XTNdO6SH5bPxgSndWgOtNX8eZaqLybhPhNF90COOEwv06sgWHYgOmS9NRwLOyb09kS21HUDHh67KvnKYUCPWgZiUqmxe8" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="417" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYLa2lVATrfEKdPlNycjvZT4qomR6OfmLdXYJ2tlBu-6A_7LRFGpYoECnFkHOREUlanap6FYGjkhtA1xP6DXkTYErKPH2XTNdO6SH5bPxgSndWgOtNX8eZaqLybhPhNF90COOEwv06sgWHYgOmS9NRwLOyb09kS21HUDHh67KvnKYUCPWgZiUqmxe8=w531-h382" width="531" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><span>As Irish society trumpets its modernity, progressivism and liberalism ever more loudly, a 'ruthless criticism of everything now existing' remains an intellectual and scholarly imperative. Irish take-up of the ideas of the famous Frankfurt School, at any of its various stages and manifestations, from Horkheimer to Honneth, has been patchy or sporadic. But the work of this school of critical theory is a huge resource for anyone wishing to cut beneath the </span><i>Irish Times</i><span> platitudes that represent serious social and political thinking in Ireland today. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiVdSLv9k8zk3Q4YB79gs_n-F93eC5GYCjQMgG4BAA-RV2ItJ76nw9gxYz0V-ZjRnKXnbdtl3A75IKlAS82lucwFHXoo3zyEUwonniOLQAf_4mhYXnG1wggtBdyRE_IoAhYShQs8ivcAF0-iitCFD1VwyaxZxDDHnEhSsh_FvsdgEDISb8T-UVNJ4MA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1056" data-original-width="1600" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiVdSLv9k8zk3Q4YB79gs_n-F93eC5GYCjQMgG4BAA-RV2ItJ76nw9gxYz0V-ZjRnKXnbdtl3A75IKlAS82lucwFHXoo3zyEUwonniOLQAf_4mhYXnG1wggtBdyRE_IoAhYShQs8ivcAF0-iitCFD1VwyaxZxDDHnEhSsh_FvsdgEDISb8T-UVNJ4MA=w532-h350" width="532" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Here is an article, at the excellent <i>Boston Review</i>, by a leading American inheritor of the Frankfurt School legacy, Seyla Benhabib, to mark the centenary:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><h3 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: var( --e-global-color-c37b961 ); font-family: var( --e-global-typography-922e06c-font-family ),Sans-serif; letter-spacing: var( --e-global-typography-922e06c-letter-spacing ); line-height: var( --e-global-typography-922e06c-line-height ); margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a data-wpel-link="internal" href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/seyla-benhabib-instanbul-frankfurt-reflections-legacy-critical-theory/" style="background-color: transparent; box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach</span></a></h3><div><br /></div><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJkXroO87s6TBdE2l1ZdT8V4k3y0PYPNGF9XT2tsRGyAKtIWTrBpWIoPAGCm9JMA98MKjPgc_EdDtCvJWIix6M1LzmSQkZ-Ws1xrxnvOHczORNr9YzFmhHJTO4HbD3NazvrlsVTwd9Y4_xWc2OTkaTTFrj7a0ayCxognjtVB82QGLmswmizJT20OHm" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="250" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJkXroO87s6TBdE2l1ZdT8V4k3y0PYPNGF9XT2tsRGyAKtIWTrBpWIoPAGCm9JMA98MKjPgc_EdDtCvJWIix6M1LzmSQkZ-Ws1xrxnvOHczORNr9YzFmhHJTO4HbD3NazvrlsVTwd9Y4_xWc2OTkaTTFrj7a0ayCxognjtVB82QGLmswmizJT20OHm=w411-h330" width="411" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><h3 class="blog-post--title" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.325; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; width: 565.963px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></h3><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">And here is an excerpt from Martin Jay's classic history of the Frankfurt School, </span><i style="font-family: times;">The Dialectical Imagination</i><span style="font-family: times;">:</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h5 style="color: #003300; line-height: 28px; margin-left: 78.2875px; margin-right: 78.2875px; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm" style="color: #006600;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung</span></a></h5></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b>Conor</b></span></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-2074101164022566552023-02-24T09:50:00.011-08:002023-03-15T15:13:44.800-07:00Criticism in a Crisis - Thinking Ukraine and Russia<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> As we pass the anniversary of Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, it is harder and harder to find space in the public sphere and the public discussion where viewpoints other than the liberal consensus can be expressed. By 'the liberal consensus', I mean the broad tendency in the EU and the United States, as far as I can see, to consider the crisis to be one entirely of Russia's making; to be without context or history or backstory; to be driven by a single psychopathic leader, Vladimir Putin; and to be resolvable principally by war. Ukraine must prevail, this line of thinking goes, Putin must fall, Russian military capacity must be destroyed, and a nice new leader must take power in Moscow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg590mjMc-ezncWiI2317niZ8dhsJG5Ix7uFYE45r8Mh_vQQmBpmNNTasir7obYw_CwXHa_OVKWaKXNbuCxPEEuGqnYpmDhvKy-va-uLcOht-g1l0uGRX4oI0PY86_8mCn8VnbD9o5ISh8wpINTdZgqMDoJqSnun2ywtziOCZpBl4JeK9R5ojqjRBin" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1080" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg590mjMc-ezncWiI2317niZ8dhsJG5Ix7uFYE45r8Mh_vQQmBpmNNTasir7obYw_CwXHa_OVKWaKXNbuCxPEEuGqnYpmDhvKy-va-uLcOht-g1l0uGRX4oI0PY86_8mCn8VnbD9o5ISh8wpINTdZgqMDoJqSnun2ywtziOCZpBl4JeK9R5ojqjRBin=w499-h333" width="499" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The problem with this line of thinking is its utterly un-reflexive nature. At no point in this ideological framework is any blundering or culpability or greed or strategizing by the United States, other great powers, NATO or the European Union considered or even imagined. Specious historical analogies are drawn - so we have Michael McDowell (not a stupid man, by any means) comparing the current moment to - wait for it - Munich 1938. This is what passes for intelligent and historically-minded 'analysis' in the <i>Irish Times</i>, the Irish 'newspaper of record'. Or we get the same <i>Irish Times</i> carrying an ignorant and superficial 'critique' of John Mearsheimer's writing about Russia and Ukraine by the <i>Financial Times</i> columnist (and Orwell Prize winner, God help us) Gideon Rachman, which ignores Mearsheimer's valuable scholarship and portrays him as a 'useful idiot' for Russia and China. One can only conclude that the likes of McDowell and Rachman are 'useful idiots' for NATO and the United States' proxy war against Russia.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJ4klcfN90wbgvtr7czVpx6woytEGKeg_nem8fq4pPFMRQx32rrLRqJTHzSVeum7WaGDKgCmCHry_Zf-jBibK46eINIGWSDN7_VmWnNo83Vm2pFa6dzqV8i-knbu1Dgzbyrs9iIMrGxQPlJmv4bQH7rQvQ0G3mQPvwBDoOO9cbG2PWLR7vPko0huvL" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="864" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJ4klcfN90wbgvtr7czVpx6woytEGKeg_nem8fq4pPFMRQx32rrLRqJTHzSVeum7WaGDKgCmCHry_Zf-jBibK46eINIGWSDN7_VmWnNo83Vm2pFa6dzqV8i-knbu1Dgzbyrs9iIMrGxQPlJmv4bQH7rQvQ0G3mQPvwBDoOO9cbG2PWLR7vPko0huvL=w590-h332" width="590" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Amidst the wreckage on the intellectual landscape, the odd beacon still stands. Mearsheimer himself is attractively irrepressible. His colleague Stephen Walt likewise. In Britain, Anatol and Dominic Lieven, major historians of Russia and of the former USSR, have been voices of integrity and nuance. Here are articles by each of them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">First, Anatol Lieven in today's <i>Guardian</i>:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="fc-item__meta js-item__meta" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-image: repeating-linear-gradient(rgb(220, 220, 220), rgb(220, 220, 220) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem, transparent 0.25rem); background-position: 50% 100%; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 0.0625rem 0.8125rem; bottom: 0px; color: #999999; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-weight: 400; height: 1rem; justify-content: flex-end; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1rem; margin-left: auto; orphans: 2; position: absolute; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; width: 220px; word-spacing: 0px;"></div><p></p><div class="fc-item__content" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #121212; display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex: 1 1 auto; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; padding-left: 0.3125rem; padding-right: 0.3125rem; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><div class="fc-item__header" style="flex: 1 1 auto; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4375rem; padding-bottom: 0.5em;"><h3 class="fc-item__title fc-item__title--quoted" style="background-image: none; color: #121212; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 0.125rem; padding-top: 0.0625rem;"><a class="fc-item__link" data-link-name="article" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/24/vladimir-putin-invade-ukraine-2022-russia" style="background: transparent; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; position: relative; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; z-index: 0;"><span class="u-faux-block-link__cta fc-item__headline" style="color: #121212; font-family: times; font-size: large; text-decoration: none;"><span class="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon" style="fill: rgb(139, 0, 0);"><span><span> </span></span></span><span class="js-headline-text"><span>For years, Putin didn’t invade U</span>kraine. What made him finally snap in 2022?</span></span></a></h3><div class="fc-item__byline" style="color: darkred; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.0125rem; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: -0.125rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Anatol Lieven</span></div></div></div><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">And an interview with Dominic Lieven, from December last:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/interview-dominic-lieven-ukraine-russia-war-crimea/32171757.html" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #fc740d; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;" title="Dominic Lieven: 'It's Against Ukraine's Interest To Take Back Crimea'"></a></span></p><h4 class="media-block__title media-block__title--size-3" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #fc740d; line-height: 1.48; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 12px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/interview-dominic-lieven-ukraine-russia-war-crimea/32171757.html"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Dominic Lieven: 'It's Against Ukraine's Interest To Take Back Crimea' (rferl.org)</span></a></h4><div><h3 class="LC20lb MBeuO DKV0Md" style="display: inline-block; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px 0px 3px; padding: 5px 0px 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></h3></div><div><h3 class="LC20lb MBeuO DKV0Md" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px 0px 3px; padding: 5px 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Conor</span></h3></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-91722985574451241722023-02-20T01:40:00.004-08:002023-02-20T01:44:11.507-08:00Blowing Up the Blowhards? - Seymour Hersh on Nordstream<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDZwKI4WU63urdj3LW_Y5GFEZkvlGHKtRB_QQ-4YYVYeUZCJxMax-3a6vsvns7Y6NCUDArj2MT0-q4h_EBbjC1_ju9vZGl9D8P6ETw25ziYV0h3iEzNVe3ubJGVhb1zbjpKhoxekBLI2_LzYgTEBTktHCPe9LNeWRKHYYYME0zlGR1JdOI6h-1Yl6I" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1075" data-original-width="1600" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDZwKI4WU63urdj3LW_Y5GFEZkvlGHKtRB_QQ-4YYVYeUZCJxMax-3a6vsvns7Y6NCUDArj2MT0-q4h_EBbjC1_ju9vZGl9D8P6ETw25ziYV0h3iEzNVe3ubJGVhb1zbjpKhoxekBLI2_LzYgTEBTktHCPe9LNeWRKHYYYME0zlGR1JdOI6h-1Yl6I=w601-h403" width="601" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Seymour Hersh is one of America's greatest investigative journalists. He'll always be remembered as the writer who exposed the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers in 1968. But his work has continued ever since. For me, his book on the secret Israeli nuclear programme, <i>The Samson Option</i> (1991) has been particularly important but his work has covered multiple issues and crises.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Hersh has now published an article on the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline, joining Russia and Germany, last September. We've been told that this action was perpetrated by Russian saboteurs. Hersh is arguing differently. His story has a significant weakness - its dependence on one source. But the flak he has taken in just days since its publication suggests that he has touched a nerve, and penetrated some of the propaganda murk which swirls around the apparent moral and political clarity with which the Ukraine war is discussed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Here is an interview with Hersh, with hyperlinks to his article, published by Sidecar, the <i>New Left Review</i> blog. It makes interesting reading.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conor</b></span></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; filter: brightness(0.65); font-family: ff-scala, Palatino, "Book Antiqua", serif; font-size: 19.2px; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 220ms ease-in 0s;"></a></p><h1 class="blog_post__title" itemprop="headline" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; font-family: ff-scala, Palatino, "Book Antiqua", serif; font-size: 2.25rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 0.5rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; text-transform: none;">How to Blow Up a Pipeline</h1><h1 class="blog_post__title" itemprop="headline" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; font-family: ff-scala, Palatino, "Book Antiqua", serif; font-size: 2.25rem; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 0.5rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; text-transform: none;"><a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; filter: brightness(0.65); font-size: 19.2px; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 220ms ease-in 0s;"><div class="blog_post__authors" itemprop="author" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(203, 68, 54); border-top: 1px solid rgb(203, 68, 54); box-sizing: inherit; font-family: ff-scala-sans-pro; font-size: 0.9rem; letter-spacing: 0.05rem; margin: 0px 0px 0.8rem; padding: 0.3rem 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">ALEXANDER ZEVIN <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">&</em> SEYMOUR HERSH</div><div class="blog_post__excerpt" itemprop="abstract" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">An interview with Seymour Hersh.</p></div></a><div class="blog_post__details" style="border-top: 1px solid rgb(203, 68, 54); box-sizing: inherit; color: #0a0a0a; font-family: ff-scala-sans-pro; font-size: 0.9rem; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: 0.05rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0.5rem 0px 0px; text-transform: uppercase; width: 638.8px;"><div class="blog_post__date" itemprop="dateCreated" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">15 FEBRUARY 2023</div><div class="tags" itemprop="keywords" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="blog_post__tag" href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/search?query%5Btag%5D=1" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 220ms ease-in 0s;">POLITICS</a></div></div></h1>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-54609776754260958242023-02-15T02:12:00.008-08:002023-02-15T03:28:56.665-08:00The Political Unconscious of Education - an interview with Jacques Ranciere<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgdgTWqq6cqDs3AcYZnCEHIxVvI_9v7GUXezHLwyulXVbmD3PpTIdE_ZQKqbFuTxHHV16e0X57dWaMYnLQJGU_GkNqhMOmbldnJe-DQlocvjGkissAhmYfZwLfErAORxp3hVUrf0Wkwst4cJsd-NTB-I4xBEOJUmBELbes75teummbbM-umfJJmQBZZ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgdgTWqq6cqDs3AcYZnCEHIxVvI_9v7GUXezHLwyulXVbmD3PpTIdE_ZQKqbFuTxHHV16e0X57dWaMYnLQJGU_GkNqhMOmbldnJe-DQlocvjGkissAhmYfZwLfErAORxp3hVUrf0Wkwst4cJsd-NTB-I4xBEOJUmBELbes75teummbbM-umfJJmQBZZ=w302-h302" width="302" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Recently, I read Pierre Bourdieu's short </span><i>Sketch Towards A Self-Analysis</i><span>, which portrays his own passage through the French education system. What jumps out from Bourdieu's book is the enormous <i>ressentiment</i> which drove him, a feeling based on his class location as a child, and his felt marginality vis-a-vis the Paris intelligentsia when at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The product, therefore, was a non-intellectual intellectual, or an intellectual who rejected the given French models of intellectuality. It was enhanced further by Bourdieu's pursuit of a career in the discipline of sociology, as against the more prestigious philosophy, and it helped to make Bourdieu's rich and revealing work on education, culture, and the production of what he famously called 'cultural capital'.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiIz1p1Ks4QFG3pnls_QyO3Polx9ntm3LC4h8AdnJ0LLqrWwUsvPGUihErvnbGoKLdtSIeO1niOECiz9UyZSZyO38ibgr5nGSuS33bwfuUImhFyEFFnjy-7X89Viww8V53-A5i14yJdLJKfLSXqPWTFdmHDIQAWXefiHDyF1qyrbkfgYRFYmO9HvQj" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="310" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiIz1p1Ks4QFG3pnls_QyO3Polx9ntm3LC4h8AdnJ0LLqrWwUsvPGUihErvnbGoKLdtSIeO1niOECiz9UyZSZyO38ibgr5nGSuS33bwfuUImhFyEFFnjy-7X89Viww8V53-A5i14yJdLJKfLSXqPWTFdmHDIQAWXefiHDyF1qyrbkfgYRFYmO9HvQj=w445-h233" width="445" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">This same outsider's scepticism is expressed in this short but very interesting interview with Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere, a philosopher from the world which Bourdieu excoriated, has his own uneasy relationship with that world - part of the Althusser circle which produced <i>Lire le Capital</i>, he later made his own break with Althusser and forged his own path in a leftist philosophy based in archival research and a renewed sense of history.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">This interview comes from the Verso website:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div><h3 class="blog-post--title" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 0.25rem;"><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5557-no-institution-emancipates-people-an-interview-with-jacques-ranciere" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ed0000; cursor: pointer; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 70ms ease-in-out 0s;"><span style="font-size: large;">‘No institution emancipates people’: An interview with Jacques Rancière</span></a></h3></div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Conor</b></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-81798323298653419132022-10-27T03:29:00.007-07:002023-01-22T08:26:48.904-08:00Mike Davis - the real McCoy<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKTSXEiib_oz16ufJdOAMv5qUMgq4Xd5ADRWZJv2-olm1zLdKGVwMaucILIuMCIiRnv5VOH7zK_E_wZurXgxqRQjzuiWGeGgrvvQXhiOrJE5OZ1CD3D8Orm3qadQIeI_YEqgXqLD05XmSp5-qjUsev8XZxHxB7zSB-JFNAjKWLZveHed5pJdWIUTZ7" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="803" data-original-width="1200" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKTSXEiib_oz16ufJdOAMv5qUMgq4Xd5ADRWZJv2-olm1zLdKGVwMaucILIuMCIiRnv5VOH7zK_E_wZurXgxqRQjzuiWGeGgrvvQXhiOrJE5OZ1CD3D8Orm3qadQIeI_YEqgXqLD05XmSp5-qjUsev8XZxHxB7zSB-JFNAjKWLZveHed5pJdWIUTZ7=w507-h340" width="507" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the great figures of the American New Left, Mike Davis, has died. He was 76 and had been fighting with laryngeal cancer for several years. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I first encountered Davis's work when I read his monumental and brilliant history of Los Angeles, <i>City of Quartz</i>, as a graduate student at Sussex. I was already interested (but characteristically under-read) in the growing field of Marxist urbanism and geography - featuring writers such as Neil Smith, David Harvey and Edward Soja. Davis was less a theorist than a historian, but it was always clear that he was steeped in the Marxist tradition, and also that he matched Marx and Engels's marvellous mix of intellectual penetration and omnivorous erudition. <i>City of Quartz</i> is a history which the novelist James Ellroy and the film-maker Michael Mann would find conducive - a stylish, unblinking exposure of the dark seamy side of the City of Angels, where the American dream is subtended by boosterism, hyper-capitalism, immigration, a notoriously corrupt police force and environmental degradation on an epic scale. Yet Davis clearly loved Los Angeles, and was endlessly curious about how it worked, its industrial zones as much as its faux Latin suburbs. If Mann - hardly a leftwing filmmaker - can make thrillers which are also visual paeans to LA's nightscapes, its highways, container farms, warehouses - films like <i>Heat</i> and <i>Collateral</i> - these elements of the megalopolis's anatomy, its skeleton, musculature and innards, also fascinated Davis.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What I didn't know at the time was that <i>City of Quartz</i> was the work of a writer already creating a torrent of essays and books which joyfully, contentiously ignored scholarly boundaries and caused trouble everywhere. Written in a deliciously mordant, pithy, ruthless <i>noir</i> prose, Davis was on course to become not only the greatest chronicler of the American working class (<i>Prisoners of the American Dream</i>), but also a radical scholar of disaster - <i>Ecology of Fear</i> and <i>Late Victorian Holocausts</i> stand out. He anticipated global health catastrophe (<i>The Monster Enters</i>), and wrote a brilliant study of the car-bomb (<i>Buda's Wagon</i>). Even more, Davis was always conscious of the poisoned nexus between capitalism and the environment: he skewered 'green capitalism' before it even had a name. And he could write the most scathing polemic - 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn', a chapter of <i>Ecology of Fear</i>, argued that municipal fire safety budgets would be better spent on protecting poor inner-city districts than on preparing to rescue the pampered idiots who had built themselves ugly mansions in remote hillside fire-zones. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Davis was not only an original scholar but also could absorb, summarize and render accessible the discourses and ideas of disciplines far from his own. For me, the stand-out here might be 'Cosmic Dancers on History's Stage? The Permanent Revolution in the Earth Sciences', an extraordinary article surveying, condensing and extrapolating from recent scholarship in earth science. Most striking in this essay was its explanation of 'coherent catastrophism' - the theory that the planet's geological, biological and maybe even human history has evolved in a complex rhythm shaped in part by elements external to the system - principally, asteroid or comet hits. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjJyJ3qjl0NtSIU5Z4kCGIe3jvuXXEZD5kwbt-AE0w8wolGlJc_2h5eTuPutVh1uKx8uAYZoCSyy-z8w7PO8o6hf9BxmUeG0jnzpYB-DvU54khANI7lXbazSHN_JIEV9wgk9Pt-AIJMSAUDzAD-wthGAllqp8LfeCI2AUQ2acOUevvk71JuQ_zyLgq0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjJyJ3qjl0NtSIU5Z4kCGIe3jvuXXEZD5kwbt-AE0w8wolGlJc_2h5eTuPutVh1uKx8uAYZoCSyy-z8w7PO8o6hf9BxmUeG0jnzpYB-DvU54khANI7lXbazSHN_JIEV9wgk9Pt-AIJMSAUDzAD-wthGAllqp8LfeCI2AUQ2acOUevvk71JuQ_zyLgq0=w374-h374" width="374" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Davis was an activist and union organiser long before he became a scholar, and his work was always firmly grounded in the political realities of the American left. Although he held academic positions, he also was a MacArthur grant winner, which allowed him a freedom of manoeuvre in intellectual and research terms. But Davis was a tough driven man, who would always have made his own way. More than most left scholars, he retained a strong sense of the necessary relationship between putatively 'radical' scholarship, and the nitty-gritty street-fighting world of organisation, campaigning and protest. A figure of the 'New Left', he never lost touch with the 'old left' of his parents' generation, and he always realised that the academy and the street sit in a dynamic relationship, where the latter is most often in the van. Here he is, on being called an 'old school socialist':</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.</span></i></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.</span></i></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”</span></i></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></i></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Mike Davis was one of the greatest exemplars of the scholar-agitator of recent times. His death is a huge loss; his work remains a resource to be treasured. </span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conor </b></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here is some material by and about Davis:</span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Obituaries</span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span><i>The Nation</i> </span><a aria-label="title Mike Davis: 1946–2022" href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-obituary/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; opacity: 1; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none; transition: opacity 0.2s ease 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">Mike Davis: 1946–2022</a></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The <i>Los Angeles Times </i> </span></p><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: Rosart, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><h2 class="promo-title" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: var(--headline-font),"times new roman",times,serif; letter-spacing: -0.2px; line-height: 1.5rem; margin: 0px;"><a class="link" href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-26/mike-davis-tribute-city-of-quartz" style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; opacity: 0.8; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Arellano: Mike Davis’ final email to me reminded me to write, not mourn</span></a></h2><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Tariq Ali, for Verso Books</span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h3 class="blog-post--title" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; line-height: 1.325; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; width: 579.797px;"><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5475-mike-davis-1946-2022-enemy-of-the-state" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ed0000; cursor: pointer; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 70ms ease-in-out 0s;"><span style="font-size: large;">Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State</span></a></h3></div><div><br /></div><h4 aria-label="description A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s memory." class="teaser_modules" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: white; font-family: "mercury display a", "mercury display b", Georgia, Cambria, "times new roman", Times, serif; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.563rem; margin: 0.2rem 0px 0.5rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: large;">A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a</span><i style="background-color: transparent; font-size: x-large; text-align: left;">in</i></h4></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Micah Uetricht, at <i>Jacobin</i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><h3 class="hm-dg__title hm-sd-sy__title hm-sd-b-sy__title" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-family: "Lateral Condensed", "Lateral Condensed Supplement", sans-serif; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="hm-dg__link hm-sd-sy__link hm-sd-b-sy__link" href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/mike-davis-death-socialism-workers-hope" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; color: red; cursor: pointer; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Mike Davis Showed Us What “Old-School Socialism” Looked Like</span></b></a></h3></div><div><br /></div>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-83101599783225565442022-10-25T13:52:00.005-07:002023-01-22T08:20:13.241-08:00Badiou on Ukraine - a prophet without honour in his own time<p><br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVcR4_fQzsVNRX5AS898uPixmgkXnq1bj41OVMXImsRejU9c_4UwF7EiZwwNnvH8ufQ8tQV_ATzGqtOxUYkgTx-9MJS5jNxfudzEB30RFcvTFKJ8DnXqvX5K_FaZJhAO9xCExWVgFjur91G6lO-PE977yehECmxeZdNxKTbyBtmz1AgNP-SPv9gsMU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVcR4_fQzsVNRX5AS898uPixmgkXnq1bj41OVMXImsRejU9c_4UwF7EiZwwNnvH8ufQ8tQV_ATzGqtOxUYkgTx-9MJS5jNxfudzEB30RFcvTFKJ8DnXqvX5K_FaZJhAO9xCExWVgFjur91G6lO-PE977yehECmxeZdNxKTbyBtmz1AgNP-SPv9gsMU=w548-h365" width="548" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p>J<span style="font-size: medium;">ust as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, in February, I had planned to blog about the possibility of war. I failed to do so - a position of intellectual caution, alas. Writing or speaking in any way critically of Western policy on Ukraine and Russia has proven, unsurprisingly, not to be the best avenue to the quiet or contemplative life.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">An exemplar to the contrary, but ahead of his time, was Alain Badiou, the veteran French philosopher and unrepentant Maoist. Here is an article he wrote in 2014 - at the time of the coup (usually known as the Maidan rebellion) which brought Zelensky's predecessor to power in that country. It's well worth revisiting now, as we live with wall-to-wall liberal militancy and mouth-frothing 'I told you so'-ism. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">More on this topic soon -</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #2288bb;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">"A present defaults – unless the crowd declares itself": Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and finitude</span></b></span></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-79725515865375362952022-10-10T11:25:00.002-07:002022-10-10T11:26:07.269-07:00Thinking the Revolution - A review of Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher's The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution<p> <span style="font-size: medium;">Ireland, in spite or even because of its claim to a great literary culture, is not a country much associated with intellectuals. Two of the country's greatest writers, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, can justly be called anti-intellectual intellectuals, with their scabrous and ferociously negative portrayals of 'projectors' (Swift) and the revolutionary cabals of the <i>philosophes</i> (Burke). In the annals of intellectuals dealing in politics, one thinks of O'Connell's brilliant but cruel evisceration of Thomas Davis. The great cultural revival of the late 19th century was built on the work of scholars, antiquarians, critics, archaeologists, but it is Yeats and Synge whom we now remember. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjXbJHsBtKe6hBVtDcX0TcHgdZToPqCMJUz01sw4m2F-8SGG1aSkZYKGn-7ibnBDEIjhPFEZ2CtsYedRGN95pozh9Q5zzUhYnk-e-ZpsBxAEU4U1LNDDGi4u2u3fAXAzTPfkSaonZg9BjTbbUQOsPtLWeQiclymD15leZPHaKUrh-2NnxYds3OIq-hT" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="614" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjXbJHsBtKe6hBVtDcX0TcHgdZToPqCMJUz01sw4m2F-8SGG1aSkZYKGn-7ibnBDEIjhPFEZ2CtsYedRGN95pozh9Q5zzUhYnk-e-ZpsBxAEU4U1LNDDGi4u2u3fAXAzTPfkSaonZg9BjTbbUQOsPtLWeQiclymD15leZPHaKUrh-2NnxYds3OIq-hT=w422-h312" width="422" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It was the signal achievement in more recent times of the late and sadly lamented Seamus Deane to assert the equality - at the very least in his own work - of scholarship and critique with literary activity and expression. A significant poet and the author of one very fine novel, Deane nevertheless poured the primary energy of his career into scholarship and criticism of the highest order. Unlike many of his peers, Deane was never afraid to consider Irish literature as a zone not only of aesthetic representation or experience, but of intellectual and even ideological exploration and activism. He was, therefore, our premier historian of ideas. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Richard Bourke, a one-time student of Deane's at UCD, has in the course of his career picked up the baton and forced the issue of intellectual history into that amorphous zone, 'Irish Studies', with a rigour and seriousness still rare among his contemporaries. His most recent book, an anthology entitled <i>The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution</i>, published in an illustrious Cambridge series, and edited with Niamh Gallagher, not only pushes the matter further still, but extends it to pedagogical ends and to a wide readership. Here the reader will find between the same covers a wide variety of Irish political writing and thinking, of the left and of the right, in defence of the Union, and in condemnation of it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg04t2u1v15b3Z9WNnLFiRnrj5G6vA6lTk3Joa4fhMbE1A0XQlNU7BWH4i3lDYBEe7i7Xcc_cIbS9FUoYbrWHd5ram7FF-X1A929v5O9wQxfS3HY4_qsTj0Qk-qOZUM4BCFmNpst_mX3HIE0j72ghD_-nMR6FuTw4S_pNuzFb8VTCzTzeLVeptnB5Ls" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="370" height="413" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg04t2u1v15b3Z9WNnLFiRnrj5G6vA6lTk3Joa4fhMbE1A0XQlNU7BWH4i3lDYBEe7i7Xcc_cIbS9FUoYbrWHd5ram7FF-X1A929v5O9wQxfS3HY4_qsTj0Qk-qOZUM4BCFmNpst_mX3HIE0j72ghD_-nMR6FuTw4S_pNuzFb8VTCzTzeLVeptnB5Ls=w305-h413" width="305" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I review this rich and fascinating collection in the current <i>Dublin Review of Books</i>. My thanks, as ever, go to Maurice Earls for making this review possible.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Conor</span></b></p><p><br /></p><h3 class="entry-title td-module-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #024b92; font-family: Georgia, "times new roman", Times, serif; font-size: 24pt; font-weight: 400; line-height: 45px; margin: -6px 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://drb.ie/articles/the-primacy-of-politics/" rel="bookmark" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="The Primacy of Politics">The Primacy of Politics</a></h3><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-30672845948998657432022-10-01T10:23:00.007-07:002022-10-01T10:25:02.721-07:00Adorno - The Repeal of the Bourgeois Era<p> </p><p><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;"></em></strong></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgoXXGjqk-Jv9etaZY6g2MWlBMNnt1z7SuOR_PcJNdOWVWboOPvspQ-9HtuDku0JwtAmQobkrS7Owr32plSM2QAHfP13RJuKlmfwxtzqNnFTFua0RbAeTBKQVAxVR1_aQId85MjsQZTULydnHb23WVTclHMd7SZSVeDsngOylkzAkXtFasblmjs3fmu" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="828" height="349" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgoXXGjqk-Jv9etaZY6g2MWlBMNnt1z7SuOR_PcJNdOWVWboOPvspQ-9HtuDku0JwtAmQobkrS7Owr32plSM2QAHfP13RJuKlmfwxtzqNnFTFua0RbAeTBKQVAxVR1_aQId85MjsQZTULydnHb23WVTclHMd7SZSVeDsngOylkzAkXtFasblmjs3fmu=w621-h349" width="621" /></a></em></strong></div><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;"><br /><br /></em></strong><p></p><p><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Pro domo nostra </em></strong></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px; margin-block: 0px; margin: 1rem 0px; max-width: 70ch;">When during the last war–which like all others, seems peaceful in comparison to its successor–the symphony orchestras of many countries had their vociferous mouths stopped, Stravinsky wrote the <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Histoire du Soldat</em> for a sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble. It turned out to be his best score, the only convincing surrealist manifesto, its convulsive, dreamlike compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth. The pre-condition of the piece was poverty: it dismantled official culture so drastically because, denied access to the latter's material goods, it also escaped the ostentation that is inimical to culture. There is here a pointer for intellectual production after the present war, which has left behind in Europe a measure of destruction undreamt of by even the voids in that music. Progress and barbarism are today so matted together in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric condition. No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of colour films and television, millionaire's magazines and Toscanini. The older media, not designed for mass-production, take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology. In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.</p><p><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></em></strong></p><p><br /></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px; margin-block: 0px; margin: 1rem 0px; max-width: 70ch;"></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5069098413324053673.post-39343894595065233112022-09-28T13:50:00.003-07:002022-09-28T13:50:30.706-07:00Adorno, Snow White and the Witch - The Critique of Optimism<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYUpPMObUfdVnmiFcZm6-VaYemd8QhAq0q6HclYlenfMkjtjLJZobsuB2GIRFtBoUu9Gy3WgzX5uZwGqQ2bgtyqPJRqg9HcIzXbYxQR1Qane1S8cdUK6mihDNousL9yCTWxddv5fD2-HlCXgol6A1SvriGd_z0kf8SfNqlqMEH8XvVhg2oTaK8biYB" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="514" height="433" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYUpPMObUfdVnmiFcZm6-VaYemd8QhAq0q6HclYlenfMkjtjLJZobsuB2GIRFtBoUu9Gy3WgzX5uZwGqQ2bgtyqPJRqg9HcIzXbYxQR1Qane1S8cdUK6mihDNousL9yCTWxddv5fD2-HlCXgol6A1SvriGd_z0kf8SfNqlqMEH8XvVhg2oTaK8biYB=w585-h433" width="585" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;">Oyer the hills -</em><span style="color: #656060; font-family: "Tiempos Text", serif; font-size: 18px;"> More perfectly than any other fairy-tale, Snow White expresses melancholy. The pure image of this mood is the queen looking out into the snow through her window and wishing for her daughter, after the lifelessly living beauty of the flakes, the black mourning of the window-frame, the stab of bleeding; and then dying in childbirth. The happy end takes away nothing of this. As the granting of her wish is death, so the saving remains illusion. For deeper knowledge cannot believe that she was awakened who lies as if asleep in the glass coffin. Is not the poisoned bite of apple which the journey shakes from her throat, rather than a means of murder, the rest of her unlived, banished life, from which only now she truly recovers, since she is lured by no more false messengers? And how inadequate happiness sounds: "Snow-White felt kindly towards him and went with him." How it is revoked by the wicked triumph over wickedness. So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath. All contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations. Truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.</span></p>Conorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02354956862503094741noreply@blogger.com0