The King’s Speech; Honey (Bal)

During a screening of the luminous new Turkish film called “Honey” (Bal) whose main character is a young boy with a stuttering problem, I said to myself: Unrepentant Marxist, why don’t you review “The King’s Speech” while you are at it. So, here goes. I doubt that two films could be more unalike, but the inclusion of central characters who stutter screams out for a comparative study approach. Frankly, as I start this review I have no idea how I can connect the two films apart from the speech defect angle, but maybe I’ll have something figured out by the end!

It is not too hard to figure out why “The King’s Speech” won the Oscar for best movie of the year. It is a highly entertaining historical drama with first-rate performances by the two lead actors: Colin Firth as King George VI (nicknamed Bertie after his first name Albert, the name Albert was eventually downplayed for sounding too Germanic) and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist Lionel Logue. The film is cut from the Merchant-Ivory cloth and features remarkably evocative costume design and scenery that makes you feel as if you have been transported to late 1930s Britain.

The screenplay is by David Seidler, a journeyman whose previous work consisted mainly of banal TV shows and movies like “Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story.” As someone who suffered from a stammering problem as a child, Seidler found himself drawn to the King George VI story. Born in 1937, Seidler grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in London and developed his speech problem on his way to the United States, where his family was relocating. He was on a three ship convoy that lost one to a U-Boat torpedo.

After learning about King George VI’s problem, he began the research for a screenplay in the 1970s. Seidler, now in remission from throat cancer, told the National Post that “being a stutterer puts a cloud over childhood.”

It can also put a cloud over the most powerful man in Britain as well. The central drama of “The King’s Speech”, as I am sure you are aware, is driven by the clash between the public’s need for a grandiloquent leader to rouse them to action and his inability to say more than a word or two without freezing up. In one of the more compelling scenes, we see Bertie watching a newsreel of Adolph Hitler in all his perverse glory making a speech at Nuremberg. After taking him for a minute or two, Bertie tells his minions that he wishes he could speak like that.

I had misgivings about the theme of the movie since I am no fan of the royalty but eventually was won over by the story and the acting. Lionel Logue, the speech therapist, is also an amateur Shakespearean actor who recites lines to his children and auditions for a production of Richard III at one point (he is deemed too old and not regal enough, a reference no doubt to his Australian origins.) It dawned on me at that point that despite the fact that most of Shakespeare’s plays are designed to flatter the British monarchy, they are part of our cultural heritage. While Seidler’s screenplay cannot be elevated to such a sphere, it does remind us that good art, even if it is popular art, can work on its own terms without being judged politically.

Indeed, I saw “The King’s Speech” much less in terms of a kind of modern-day reworking of a Shakespeare play about royalty than as an inversion of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”. Shaw’s tale involves an upper-class twit teaching a commoner how to speak properly, while Seidler reverses the roles. Logue not only teaches the British monarch to properly manage his stutter (it cannot be cured) but to relate to common people in a more humane manner, starting with himself. In the opening scene, Logue insists on the two men calling each other by their first names, Lionel and Bertie, even though the future King finds this almost intolerable. While Seidler probably did not consider this when writing his screenplay, one can easily make the connection with another class inversion, namely P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, the British aristocrat who must be taught about life by his manservant.

While “The King’s Speech” succeeds as a kind of old-fashioned, four-square, conventional film, “Honey” succeeds on its own terms, namely as an art movie that defies audience expectations of both character and plot.

The central character in “Honey” is a six-year-old boy named Yusuf (Bora Altaş, a non-professional) who lives with his father Yakup (Erdal Besikçioglu) and mother Zehra (Tülin Özen) in a remote mountainous village where life appears not much different than it was a hundred years ago in Turkey, especially how Yakup makes his living. He is a beekeeper who scales tall trees in pursuit of the high-quality honey found in the area.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of bees drives him further and further up the mountains where he installs new hives at the top of trees in hope of attracting the creatures that sustain him and his family. The film opens with him scaling a tall tree, navigating to the middle of a branch to which he will attach a new hive. Just as he has begun his work, the branch breaks and leaves him suspended precariously far above the ground.

In a series of flashbacks, we see how the family relates to each other and its environment. While the mother and father are key characters, it is really Yusuf’s story. Early on, his father asks him to read from the Koran, which he does with great ease and fluidity. A day or so later, we see him in a classroom where the teacher asks the children to take turns reading from a primer. When a girl begins reading a page or two from the story The Lion and the Mouse, we see Yusuf mouthing the words silently one step ahead of her. Clearly, he knows how to read. But when it is his turn to read, he has the same paralysis as Bertie, the future king, and cannot utter more than a word or two without looking up at the teacher in total consternation. At this point, all the other students begin laughing at him.

“Honey” dispenses with plot almost entirely. Except for wondering about the fate of the father, we rely mostly on the quotidian existence of a very traditional family to sustain our interest. There is very little dialog in the film apart from the father speaking to his son about his expectations from him. Unlike few films I have seen in this or any other year, “Honey” conveys a father’s love for his son in a more convincing and moving fashion than one would be led to expect. With so many Hollywood films (Little Miss Sunshine, for example) drenched in family unhappiness and loathing, it is a breath of fresh air to be reminded that solidarity within a family unit is possible.

Most of “Honey” follows Yusuf on his daily rounds: picking eggs out of a coop for his mother to make cookies for dad; ambling off to school on a muddy road; following his father as he tends to the hives, etc. All in all, director Semih Kaplanoglu seems to have absorbed the aesthetic of the new Iranian film that seeks to depict the lives of ordinary people in a compassionate and naturalistic manner.

In an interview with The People’s Voice, Kaplanoglu presented his views on a number of topics:

Q: What’s your view on the interlaced correlation of modern cinema with violence, aggression and depravity? Are these scenes which we expose to a wide range of large-scale audiences including women, children and the youth enough healthy and proper for them?

A: It is where the human centered civilization takes and leaves us. What we see is falling away from the spirituality and ego being more favored. The art, however, is becoming more egocentric in all its forms. Another drawback is the idea of craftsmanship is extinguishing within the art. Tradition and certain code of conduct vanish too as a result. We are leading lives in such a carnal civilization that it proves to be impossible to feel and perceive what is in front of our bare eyes. On the other hand, imagery is so filthy that it’s no longer able to show. There is a huge mechanism designed to hide the truth or at least tune it down. Truth is perceived as a new contrived world because it is kept away from us. We got accustomed to death and violence. Nothing moves us anymore. There is a tiny single button to switch from child casualties and a silly competition. If truth doesn’t touch your conscience and refused by you then what can a film do? Cinema and other forms of art are helpless in the face of our pathetic and miserable situation. If the images of dead Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Afghan kids or refugees or African poor don’t have an impact on us and we go on our lives undisturbed, then which artist or filmmaker can touch our hearts? We should be more alert and conscious in this world. We should keep remembering these two; Unity of the Creator and his consent. I am trying to make my films based or these principles.

Q: What’s in your view, the ultimate goal of art in general, and what is precisely sought in our approaches toward art? Do we search for an ephemeral and mere enjoyment by watching a 1 hour movie, or is there something beyond that?

A: When the time of artwork diverges from our own time it also causes one to get detached from the time he lives in. One wastes his life with showbiz, an industry of gossip and distraction yet he doesn’t want to die. He is bloody scared of death. He doesn’t want to say or hear anything of his death. On the other hand he wishes to see the death of others. It means the lapse of time and the perception of time will disappears. “I watched a film and didn’t realize how the time passed” people say. On the contrary you should notice how the time has passed. The Aristotelian understanding of art aims at purgation of emotions. Film bridges the gap between ego and the soul. Self identifies with it. It is useless art, useless knowledge otherwise. I know the masses relate to what is associated with ego because such films don’t challenge the audience and don’t expect them to contribute. But we don’t have to succumb to that rule. We are also responsible to find a way to reach out to the masses. There are two sides to a coin.

“Honey” is scheduled to open in New York on Friday, March 25 at the Village East Cinema. Highly recommended.

Why Qaddafi need not worry about imperialist intervention

At least as long as he continues to smash the poorly trained and armed revolutionaries.

“In Brussels, top representatives to NATO on Thursday were debating whether to impose a no-flight zone in the country, an idea that might lose support if European governments think that American spy agencies believe Colonel Qaddafi is likely to defeat the rebels.”

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/world/africa/11clapper.html

 

In response to Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Yesterday I was informed that Edward Herman and David Peterson had responded a few months ago to my February 20, 2010 article titled The Latest Idiocy from Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.

There was a time when I would have paid closer attention to what the two had to say but have tuned them out because of their repetitiveness and prolixity. Basically, their methodology is the same one used by Michel Chossudovsky, MRZine, and some bloggers who have learned to put a minus where the U.S. State Department puts a plus as Leon Trotsky commented:

In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.

A few words about these two would probably be in order. Herman is an 85-year-old Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, something that amounted to a kind of day job I guess. (His first book was Principles And Practices Of Money And Banking.) He is best known for co-authoring “Manufacturing Consent” with Noam Chomsky. Unlike Chomsky—an anarchist—Herman has never written anything that amounts to a program for revolutionary change. His main preoccupation is with the propaganda system that American imperialism uses to make war on its enemies.

Somewhere along the line Herman hooked up with someone named David Peterson, who is a lot younger from what I can gather. About all I know about him is that he describes himself as an independent journalist based in Chicago. My guess is that he has never been involved with socialist politics. And if he has, the tracks are well covered.

As I said, the two are never at a loss for words. Their reply to me is contained in the third part of a 33,000 word article titled Iran and Honduras in the Propaganda System: How the Left Climbed Aboard the Establishment’s Bandwagon in obvious defiance of the stricture that brevity is the soul of wit.

After fortifying myself with a second cup of extra-strong coffee, I waded into their 3-part article to see what had motivated them to write such a tome. I suspect that they are incapable of writing fewer than 20,000 words but I am not sufficiently motivated to do the necessary research to verify this.

The main thrust of their article is to demonstrate that the U.S. has a double standard when it comes to Iran and Honduras.

The Honduran military executed its coup d’état against President Zelaya only 16 days after the presidential election in Iran, in the middle of a tsunami of U.S. and Western media coverage of Iran’s election and its aftermath, which saw the opposition’s claims of vote fraud5 spark massive public demonstrations against both the official results and Iran’s clerical regime itself, and also saw large and sustained expressions of solidarity with Iran’s “democratic movement” dominating the metropolitan centers of the West.  Yet, when the coup in Honduras took place against its democratically-elected and populist president, nothing comparable was to be observed in U.S. and Western media interest in this event and its aftermath, much less in public displays of solidarity on behalf of Honduras’ ousted president and its anti-coup protestors.

They liken Iran’s most recent election to the ones that took place in Nicaragua in the 1980s, equating a demonized Ahmadinejad to a demonized Daniel Ortega. As someone who was part of a delegation in Nicaragua to observe the election of 1984, I wonder where the authors get the audacity to compare the two. In Iran the election was between two candidates who had been sanctioned by the Guardian Council, a small group of clerics that operate independently of the will of the people. Furthermore, in Iran there is no freedom for political groups or newspapers that would challenge the right of clerics to set the terms of democracy. Imagine if people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell had the ultimate say on who could run for office in the U.S.A. And if you had started a socialist newspaper, you risked imprisonment or death. These are the brutal realities behind Iran’s electoral system that could barely interest Herman and Peterson. Perhaps if questions of class interested them a bit more, they would be a bit more sensitive to them.

When they get down to brass tacks in part three, they group me with Joanne Landy and Danny Postel, two individuals who would be shocked to discover me as a bedfellow. Landy was a member of the Council of Foreign Relations at one point, and used to attend events with Katrina Vanden Heuvel. Just my kind of folks. I won’t say anything much about Postel except to take note that he orients to the Iranian liberal intelligentsia while I am close to Marxist bloggers. I guess it is all the same to the nearsighted anti-imperialists Herman and Peterson.

To start off, the two intrepid anti-imperialist sleuths misunderstimate me, as George W. Bush would say: “As the U.S. wars of the post-Soviet era caused a peeling-off of leftist after leftist, the Marxmail administrator and blogger Louis Proyect resisted, remaining staunchly anti-imperialist.” Sorry, comrades, I am not just an “anti-imperialist”. I am an anti-capitalist, and—with all due respect to people like Naomi Klein–I am not just an anti-capitalist. I am an unrepentant Marxist. This means that while I am willing to take the side of Iran on the question of opposing sanctions and supporting its right to develop nuclear power (and arms, for that matter), I will not back any government that jails and tortures bus drivers for trying to start a union. Maybe Edward Herman got the idea when teaching finance at Wharton that it is sometimes necessary to keep labor costs down when raising capital for a bond issue but that is alien to me. It is all the more alien when trade unionists in Egypt and Wisconsin are fighting for their own rights as well. Don’t Iranian workers also have such a right? Or does that matter to people like Herman and Peterson who only understand the conflicts between states and not those between classes?

Apparently, I violated my oath to the anti-imperialist cause when “the eruption of election-related turmoil struck Iran in June 2009, and the Western establishment threw its collective weight behind the ‘Green Wave’ opposition.” They claim “Proyect suddenly did an about-face, and enlisted in the cause.”

Well, this is utter nonsense. I began to pay close attention to the brutality and neoliberal character of the Islamic Republic back in 2006 when Yoshie Furuhashi, the editor of MRZine who published Herman and Peterson’s article, began her fulsome praise of Ahmadinejad not long after giving up on socialism. Who would want to mess around with small groups like Solidarity when Ahmadinejad was deploying vast numbers of Basiji. Something told me that this was a pile of crap and I was determined to get to the bottom of that.

This led me to write a multi-part review of a book titled “Iran on the Brink” in 2007, a book I recommend highly, especially to Herman and Peterson who evidently are rather virginal when it comes to Marxist analysis of Iran. Here’s an excerpt from part one of my review:

“Iran on the Brink” provides historical background on revolutionary movements in Iran, starting in the early 20th century. Attempts to break with colonial domination and the native comprador bourgeoisie kept being thwarted, the most notable example being the coup against Mossadegh in 1953 that led to the Reza Shah dictatorship that was finally overthrown in 1979.

The authors focus on the emergence of shoras that arose spontaneously in factories and oil refineries around the country shortly after the Shah’s cronies fled the country. The shoras started out as strike committees but were then transformed into workers control bodies. They very much reflected the kind of aspirations seen in Venezuela today and target number one of Khomeini and his followers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad included. A worker at a shoe factory spoke for all Iranian workers when he said:

Nowadays you don’t need to tell a worker to go and work. He works himself. Why? The reason why he didn’t work [under the Shah] was because he was under the boss’s thumb. He couldn’t speak out. Now, he’ll say: “the work is my own. I’ll work.”

Unfortunately, the shoras failed to become the new state power, just as Soviets had become in 1917. Unlike Russia, the Iranians lacked a revolutionary party that could coordinate the shoras nationwide and press the struggle forward. This is not to say, however, that there weren’t groups in Iran that aspired to Lenin’s mantle. There were more than eighty of them, in fact. Unfortunately, the only thing that united them was sectarianism mixed with an eagerness to adapt to political Islam. In 1979, the Iranian left was still stuck in the same mode that would destroy the left in so many countries, namely a dogmatic understanding of what it meant to be a “vanguard”. The particular irony is that Iranian workers would have been more receptive to the leadership of a revolutionary party than anywhere else in the world.

Among the most prestigious of the revolutionary organizations was the Fediyan that had conducted a guerrilla struggle against the Shah since 1971. Its main rival was the Tudeh, the official Communist Party. Both groups were heavily influenced by Stalinist top-down methods and were hardly in a position to engage with so profoundly a bottom-up phenomenon like the shoras. It should be added that the Tudeh did have an interest in the shoras, but it could be described as the kind of interest that the Democrats had in Ralph Nader. The Tudeh’s goal was to replace the shoras with conventional trade unions of the sort that they had operated in historically. Eventually, the Tudeh made a bloc with the Majority faction of the Fediyan that shared its hostility to the shoras and its belief that political Islam was progressive. With the two most powerful groups on the left holding such beliefs, one might conclude that the rise of Khomeini-ism had more to do with the bankruptcy of the left than its own dubious merits.

Khomeini soon developed a substitute for the shoras that was called the shora-ye eslami, or “Islamic council”. Rather than operating on the basis of class struggle, the new bodies would stress Muslim brotherhood. This was a brotherhood that first and foremost would put a ban on strikes, effective in March 1980. Strikes were now considered haram, or sinful. Just to make sure that nobody lapsed into sinful behavior, the government set up Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) that would break strikes and enforce discipline within the workplace. One metal factory worker described the kind of punishment Pasdaran meted out to the unruly:

They flogged one of my colleagues to death. They accused him of having cursed Imam Ali. First they brought him to prison, but then they dragged him to the factory and bound him to a machine. All production was stopped and we were ordered to appear in front of the scene. I could only stand to have my eyes on him for two lashes. Then blood was gushing from his wounds. He died after 50, 60 lashes. He was about 50 years old.

At any rate such workers could matter less to Herman and Peterson. They are completely absorbed by the fact that Ahmadinejad is being demonized by the N.Y. Times.

Moving right along, I am found guilty of not writing about Honduras:

Although chiding the present writers for our alleged inattention to class, Proyect—in strict parallel with Danny Postel, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, the New York Times, and the State Department—had nothing whatever to say about Honduras, where the class nature of the 2009 coup and regime change is far clearer than it has been for the conflict in Iran.

I don’t quite know how to break it to these two jerks, but the fact that I have not written about Honduras should not be interpreted as support for the American-backed coup. I am not trying to compete with Counterpunch or ZNet. If you are looking for radical news analysis of current events, those are the places you are advised to go. My blog was launched with the intention of writing about whatever interests me at the moment, ranging from my struggles with glaucoma to musings on African music. And I have no plans to change that any time soon.

The Desert of Forbidden Art

Opening at NY’s Cinema Village on March 11^th and the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles on March 18^th, the documentary “The Desert of Forbidden Art” is the definitive treatment of the clash between the artist and the Stalinist system and makes a perfect companion piece to Chris Marker’s “The Last Bolshevik“, which described the plight of film directors such as Alexander Medvedkin, who sought to affirm his artistic integrity in a period of bureaucratic conformity enforced by the secret police.

“The Desert of Forbidden Art” is directed by Amanda Pope, a UCLA film professor who made “Faces of Change” about reformers in the former Soviet Union, and Tchavdar Georgiev, a Russian now working in the U.S. It tells the story of Igor Savitsky, a young painter who was born to an aristocratic family in 1915. When they followed their class instincts and moved to the West, Savitsky stayed behind and enrolled at the Moscow Art Institute. In 1943, the institute was relocated to remote Uzbekistan to escape the Nazi onslaught. The Central Asian culture fascinated Savitsky in the same way that Polynesia fascinated Gauguin. After falling in love with the people and their culture (to the extent of converting to Islam), Savitsky returned to the town of Nukus in 1950 with the intention of preserving folk art, including traditional costumes. Using some of the most amazing archival footage from the Soviet era you have ever seen, we see young Uzbeki females being forced to abandon their customs, including their beautiful clothing, and becoming a forcibly assimilated Soviet Citizen.

Not long after sinking roots in the area, Savitsky learned that Uzbekistan was a haven for artists who were determined to continue painting as if the USSR was still in its heroic phase, when artists such as Malevich and Rodchenko had free rein. Like Savitsky, they fell in love with Uzbeki culture and blended local folkloric elements into their overall avant-garde vision.

The film gives ample documentation of the output of these geniuses, whose work was preserved by Savisky, and their run-ins with the Stalinist machine that dictated Socialist Realism. The film relies on the testimony of Savitsky’s peers who are still living, the sons and daughters of the artists whose work he preserved, and a number of experts on his project, both Russian and English-speaking.

One of them is Stephen Kinzer, who first wrote about the Nukus Museum in January, 1998. The article titled In a Far Desert, a Startling Trove of Art is a good introduction to this amazing story:

SAVITSKY BEGAN collecting ancient artifacts, some of them dating from the third century B.C. Later he broadened his interest to include folk art and ethnography. He traveled from village to village persuading peasant families to sell or give him traditional costumes, jewelry and other artifacts that in the Stalinist era were considered signs of backwardness and possible treason. In 1966 he opened a museum to display his collection. Already, however, he had set his sights on bigger game.

During the 1960′s and 70′s, Savitsky scoured Moscow, Leningrad and other Soviet cities in search of works by Russian artists who had died unknown, some in labor camps or mental hospitals. Gradually he won the trust of widows and relatives, many of whom were happy to be rid of piles of rotting work. In one case he rescued an oil painting being used to patch a leaky roof.

Savitsky, who died in 1984, had the advantage of working almost without competition. Most Soviet museums were forbidden to display avant-garde art because the Government considered it not only hideous but degenerate. The few private collectors of the period bought no more than a handful of works. Only Savitsky, whose base in the Uzbek region of Karakalpakstan was almost unimaginably far from the centers of Soviet power, was allowed to collect, and he did so with boundless passion.

One might think that after the collapse of the Stalinist system in the early 90s that “freedom-loving” authorities would rally around the Nukus Museum. Sadly but not unexpectedly you see narrow-mindedness persisting. In a March 7^th New York Times article timed to coincide with the opening of the documentary, we learn that Uzbek officials had given the museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its buildings two years ago. The problems, it would seem, have a lot to do with the disgusting chauvinism of the greater Russian nationality that convinced Lenin to break with Stalin just before his death. The Times reports:

More than a dozen years later the collection remains intact. But it also remains hidden from the public. After exhibitions in Germany and France in the 1990s, the Uzbek Ministry of Culture has consistently refused invitations to display the collection overseas, Ms. Babanazarova said. (One exception was three paintings now on view in the Netherlands.)

There has been no clear explanation for this policy, but it may reflect Uzbeks’ lasting ambivalence toward Russia’s imperial influence. Independent since 1991, Uzbekistan vigorously promotes native art forms like weaving and engraving. The works in Mr. Savitsky’s collection — many made by ethnic Russians — have no place in that campaign.

“Despite all the publicity, it’s dormant,” Mr. Bowlt said. “It’s a shame — there are so many extraordinary paintings by virtually unknown artists that deserve to be talked about, written about. It hasn’t happened.”

Uzbek authorities have shown bursts of support for the collection. In 2003 President Islam A. Karimov himself came to Nukus to inaugurate a new museum building, which Ms. Babanazarova called “one of the best buildings in the country,” and Mr. Savitsky received a posthumous state honor. And last year the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan financed its own documentary on the Savitsky Collection, which will be shown in Uzbek embassies in a bid to attract tourists to Nukus.

Nevertheless, one day last November when Ms. Babanazarova was out of town, officials backed up trucks to the museum’s old exhibition building and ordered workers to remove all the artworks, saying the building, which dates to the 1950s, would be demolished as part of an urban renewal project. David Pearce, chairman of the Friends of the Nukus Museum, a nongovernmental organization, said a deputy minister of culture assured him late last year that the state planned to build new space to replace what was lost, and that it would be ready by this fall. But months have passed with no evident progress.

Museum supporters — who include current and former Western diplomats — say they have no idea what the government is planning. Some suggested that Ms. Babanazarova had run afoul of officials because of her fierce defense of the collection or her independent contacts with foreigners.

“I think it’s sort of ignorance and circling the wagons, it’s fear,” said Amanda Pope, a director of the new American documentary, with Tchavdar Georgiev. “No one will explain.”

I strongly urge everyone to see this outstanding documentary in NY or Los Angeles. For those who still believe that socialism is preferable to capitalism, it is especially rewarding to see the work of Soviet artists who never gave up hope that their work was intimately tied to that belief rather than an “anti-Soviet” offense punishable by prison, torture or death.

Qaddafi: Crackdown on Libya revolt is like Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza

http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/gadhafi-crackdown-on-libya-revolt-is-like-israel-s-war-on-hamas-in-gaza-1.347662

Gadhafi: Crackdown on Libya revolt is like Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza

Speaking to France 24, long-time Libyan Leader says estimated figures of rebel, civilian casualties are exaggerated, adding that at most ’150 to 200 people were killed.’

By Haaretz Service Tags: Israel news Libya Hamas Gaza

Long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi said Monday in an interview with TV network France 24 that his violent crackdown on opposition protesters is akin to Israel’s efforts to defend itself from extremism during its 2009 Gaza war against Hamas.

Libya has come under international scrutiny in recent weeks, in response to violent clashes between the Libyan military and anti-Gadhafi rebels, confrontations which caused what are estimated to be hundreds of deaths.

On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon dispatched a team to Tripoli to assess the humanitarian situation in the wake of the Libyan crisis, criticizing the Libya military’s “disproportionate use of force.”

Speaking with France 24 later Monday, however, Gadhafi defended his military’s right to oppress rebel activity, comparing his crackdown to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2009, saying that “even the Israelis in Gaza, when they moved into the Gaza strip, they moved in with tanks to fight such extremists.”

“It’s the same thing here! We have small armed groups who are fighting us. We did not use force from the outset… Armed units of the Libyan army have had to fight small armed al Qaida bands. That is what’s happened,” Gadhafi said.

Referring to the purported number of casualties in wake of fighting in Libya, the long-time leader claimed “there have been at most 150 to 200 people killed.”

View Libya in a larger map

“People should come here and see how many people have been killed. They can come and check among the population, and among the police and the army,” Gadhafi said.

Gadhafi also dismissed the assessment that recent events injured the Libya’s links with the West, saying that the country had “very good relations with the United States, with the European Union and with African countries,” adding that “Libya plays a crucial role in regional and world peace.”

The interview came as earlier Sunday, a top official in Gadhafi ruling establishment made an unprecedented appeal to dialogue between the warring factions, in attempt to end the conflict.

Jadallah Azous Al-Talhi, a Libyan prime minister in the 1980s who is originally from eastern Libya, appeared on state television reading an address to elders in Benghazi, the main base of the anti-Gadhafi rebels.

He asked them to “give a chance to national dialogue to resolve this crisis, to help stop the bloodshed, and not give a chance to foreigners to come and capture our country again.”

A reply to Jean Bricmont

Jean Bricmont

I am having a hard time deciding whether Jean Bricmont’s article on today’s Counterpunch is more meretricious than the one that appeared yesterday by Diana Johnstone. Both attempt to depict Libya as a second Kosovo with a looming “humanitarian intervention”. Bricmont’s article is slightly ahead in this horse race since it starts off with a cheap smear against unnamed “Trotkyist” [sic] groups:

The whole gang is back: The parties of the European Left (grouping the  “moderate” European communist parties), the “Green” José Bové, now allied with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has never seen a US-NATO war he didn’t like, various Trotkyist groups and of course Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, all calling for some sort of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or accusing the Latin American left, whose positions  are far more sensible, of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant.”

My first reaction after reading this glob of rhetorical spit was to post a query on the Marxism listserv as to which Trotskyists are for a US-NATO war on Libya. Whatever the foibles of this tendency on the left, it is not known for backing imperialist interventions. After parsing Bricmont’s prose carefully, I finally figured out what he was trying to say. There are some groups and individuals who are for no-fly zones, etc. (Cohn-Bendit) or there are some groups that accuse the Latin American left (that’s his term, not mine, for the proclamations of Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro—I see the left as being a lot broader) of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant”. That’s a pretty nifty use of the connective “or”. I imagine that Bricmont must have learned it from whatever is the equivalent of Time Magazine in Belgium.

Bricmont throws up his hands and says that not enough is known about what is happening in Libya to make an opinion on—one presumes— which side to support:

It is difficult for ordinary citizens to know exactly what is going on in Libya, because Western media have thoroughly discredited themselves in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, and alternative sources are not always reliable either. That of course does not prevent the pro-war left from being absolutely convinced of the truth of the worst reports about Qaddafi, just as they were twelve years ago about Milosevic.

I don’t know what kind of information Bricmont needs to get his hands on to figure out what Qaddafi is all about but I would start with this article that I posted in full yesterday:

The European Union is keen to strike a pact with Muammar Gaddafi to stem the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean, officials said today, after the Libyan leader put a price tag of €5bn (£4.1bn) a year on the deal.

“There is great scope to develop cooperation with Libya on migration,” said Matthew Newman, a commission spokesman. Other officials said three negotiating sessions were expected by the end of the year between Brussels and Tripoli as well as the staging of a summit of EU and African leaders in Libya in November.

In a highly theatrical visit to Italy this week, Gaddafi warned that Europe would turn “black” unless it was more rigorous in turning back immigrants. Libya is a key transit point for illegal migration from Africa to Europe. The Libyan leader said the bill for sealing the crossing routes would be at least €5bn a year.

I found out about Milosevic by digging through 10 years worth of Lexis-Nexis articles. You can pretty much do the same thing with Qaddafi. Maybe Bricmont is too busy studying neutrons or whatever it is he does for a living to take the trouble. My advice is to limit his search in Lexis-Nexis to “Libya” and “Blair” and “deal” from the period 2004 to 2007 as a start, sorted by relevance. I am sure he will find it most edifying. This is from the Scotsman newspaper dated March 28, 2004:

IT was only lunchtime but the whisky and gin were flowing from the British Embassy in Tripoli last Thursday. Fresh camels’ milk and water had been on offer outside Colonel Gaddafi’s tent, and the returning diplomats went straight for something stronger.

The mood was of mild but universal shock. Even those who had for weeks recited the political rationale of the meeting found themselves stunned at the sight of a British prime minister lunching with one of the world’s most notorious dictators.

Tony Blair called it extending the “hand of partnership.” For one embassy guest, this was more than a soundbite: Malcolm Brinded, Royal Dutch/Shell’s head of exploration, had just signed a GBP 110m deal to hunt for gas off Libya’s coast.

Britain’s diplomatic invasion of Libya last week was a superbly orchestrated coup which has stolen a march on America. In the 15 weeks since Gaddafi agreed to surrender his nuclear and chemical weapons programme, London has not missed a beat.

While Washington has refused to lift trade sanctions and boasts about “moving the goalposts”, Blair has succeeded in positioning Britain’s defence industry alongside Libya while returning Shell to the country after a 30-year absence.

This is neither a fortuitous side-effect nor a cynical attempt to make money. Blair last week deployed a carefully crafted model where business is the agent of regime change. It was peace, tailor-made for a country with 30 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

In fact as I have pointed out repeatedly, the analogy is not between Qaddafi and Milosevic but between Qaddafi and Kostunica, the neoliberal Serbian politician who succeeded Milosevic in a coup. What is confusing for people with little interest in recent Libyan history, like Bricmont and Johnstone, is that Qaddafi morphed into his opposite. He was not being demonized in the Western press but treated as “one of us”. It was only when a mass movement began to threaten to remove him by force that the imperialists rediscovered that he was a bad guy. The only reason they have considered moving against him was to make sure that they maintained some kind of foothold in Libya. But if Benghazi had not risen up, there would have not been the slightest interest in removing Qaddafi. After all, Shell, BP and Exxon would have found that most inconvenient when it came to cutting deals with the Libyan bourgeoisie, especially the head of the state oil industry who was quoted in the New Yorker magazine as follows:

[Prime Minister Ghanem] Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close to him and by those who pretend to be close to him–he has a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School, at Tufts–has a certain portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan doubletalk.

I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not seeking too much popularity, is a better way. Those who can excel should get more–having a few rich people can build a whole country.”

What a far cry from Milosevic’s defiant stand against Western financial and military power.

Finally, after all this fire-breathing “anti-imperialism” from the tenured physics professor who never organized a single antiwar demonstration in his entire life (I’m willing to bet), we are left with this “peace” proposal:

The recent meeting of the Bolivarian Alliance could serve as an example: the Latin American left wants peace and they want to avoid US intervention, because they know that they are in the sights of the US and that their process of social transformation requires above all peace and national sovereignty. Hence, they suggest sending an international delegation, possibly led by Jimmy Carter (hardly a stooge of Qaddafi), in order to start a negotiation process between the government and the rebels. Spain has expressed interest in the idea, which is of course rejected by Sarkozy. This proposition may sound utopian, but it might not be so if it were supported by the full weight of the United Nations.

To start with, to talk about “peace” in Libya implicitly means accepting the legitimacy of the Qaddafi dictatorship. This is a government that rules by terror and that has been in power for 41 years, seeking to extend its rule through a dynasty based on bloodlines. How can a leftist call for anything except the overthrow of such a despotic regime? Before its neoliberal turn, a confused left-liberal like Bricmont might have had some excuse but with such a combination of police state brutality and the economic policies described by the former Prime Minister as being “hard on those you love”, no such justification exists.

For someone so self-consciously anti-imperialist as Bricmont, it is shocking to see his approval for a peace plan “supported by the full weight of the United Nations”. I don’t know how to break it to comrade Bricmont, but that full weight has fallen heavily in the past on Korea, Congo, and Haiti—three victims of armed intervention by the blue helmet imperialist peace-keepers. And when the UN was not dispatching its troops, it was organizing a sanction against Iraq that cost the lives of a half-million children.

Like the League of Nations, the United Nations is an imperialist institution. Dominated by the U.S. and its lackeys, it is doubtful that it would ever do anything that threatened the class interests of the dominant powers. Perhaps Bricmont’s time would be better spent learning about the class realities of such a reactionary institution rather than giving it his benedictions on Counterpunch.

Qaddafi demands 5 billion euros to keep Europe white

EU keen to strike deal with Muammar Gaddafi on immigration

Commission chiefs to hold talks with Libya over Gaddafi’s demand for €5bn a year to stop Europe turning ‘black’

• Ian Traynor in Brussels
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 September 2010 17.58 BST
• Article history

Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi at a conference in Italy this week, where Gaddafi said the bill for sealing the crossing routes for illegal immigrants from Libya to Europe would be €5bn a year. Photograph: Olycom SPA / Rex Features

The European Union is keen to strike a pact with Muammar Gaddafi to stem the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean, officials said today, after the Libyan leader put a price tag of €5bn (£4.1bn) a year on the deal.

“There is great scope to develop cooperation with Libya on migration,” said Matthew Newman, a commission spokesman. Other officials said three negotiating sessions were expected by the end of the year between Brussels and Tripoli as well as the staging of a summit of EU and African leaders in Libya in November.

In a highly theatrical visit to Italy this week, Gaddafi warned that Europe would turn “black” unless it was more rigorous in turning back immigrants. Libya is a key transit point for illegal migration from Africa to Europe. The Libyan leader said the bill for sealing the crossing routes would be at least €5bn a year.

While the commission in Brussels said that much could be achieved with Libya “for lesser amounts than that named by Colonel Gaddafi”, Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, supported the Libyan leader. He said European government chiefs would discuss the proposed migration pact at the Tripoli summit.

Frattini went to Libya today to chair a meeting of Mediterranean-rim countries, five from the EU and five in the Maghreb.

“Gaddafi was making an argument all the other Arab leaders in north Africa have made, which is that they don’t want to be the gendarmes of Europe,” Frattini said. “The issue of the 5 billion [euros] has not been looked at up to now. We will look at it in European meetings and I imagine it will be considered at a European-African summit in Libya in November.”

Libya is already taking part in three “pilot projects” set up by the EU and Italy on migration, and Tripoli has received almost €20m in EU funding, the European commission said.

While in Rome Gaddafi advised Europeans to convert to Islam and sought to bolster his claim for billions from Europe by warning that millions of Africans were seeking to migrate to the EU.

“We don’t know what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans,” the Libyan leader told a Rome meeting attended by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. “We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

Relations between Berlusconi and Gaddafi are strong, based on booming business ties and repression of immigrants. Under a much-criticised deal struck two years ago, Italian border patrols in the Mediterranean are turning back thousands of migrants at sea. They are returned to Libya without being screened for legitimate political asylum cases.

“Europe needs to finally get a migration policy, giving plenty of funds to the migrants’ countries of origin and helping transit countries facing a huge burden,” Frattini said.

The Rome-Tripoli accord has decreased the numbers of illegal migrants coming into the EU. According to one set of EU figures, the number of illegal immigrants last year fell by more than three quarters to 7,300.

But a confidential internal security report from EU police and border agencies, leaked to the Statewatch whistleblower this week, said 900,000 illegal immigrants were entering the EU every year.

“The risk of illegal migration by north, east and west African nationals to the EU remains high,” said the report. “Libya remains a focal point despite recent success in disrupting entry into the EU by this route.”

 

Hillary Clinton greets an anti-imperialist leader

CLICK TO PLAY

Diana Johnstone, Qaddafi, and the dangers of rote thinking

Diana Johnstone

As someone who was a fairly high-profile defender of Milosevic during the war in Kosovo, I might have been expected to apply the same “formula” to other subsequent “color revolutions” as has been the case with Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research website, MRZine, the Marcyite sects, et al. Perhaps my close proximity at one time to Jared Israel served to inoculate me against such susceptibility. After seeing him “evolve” first into a rabid defender of Putin and other such former Soviet bloc thugs, then a 9/11 Truther (a function of his pre-existing Islamophobia and a belief that the CIA orchestrates everything), and then finally into a hardened Likudite who supported Israel’s war on Gaza, I took a deep breath and said that something more nuanced was needed. You can’t simply put a minus where the ruling class puts a plus.

It also bothered me that many of the “anti-imperialists” took up the cause of Robert Mugabe. Because he was being demonized in the liberal press and because he was a leader of the guerrilla struggle for national independence, that was all that they needed to know. If ISO members in Zimbabwe were being arrested, that was acceptable to some. A kind of crude amalgam was made between these revolutionary socialists and the MDC that they participated in for a time. Because Soros donated money to the MDC, then the entire struggle against Mugabe was tarnished. This kind of “if, then” logic is what you might see in a textbook on formal logic and arguably belongs there.

But things really came to a head with Iran. As someone who followed events closely in the early 80s when Khomeini cracked down on the left, even putting his opponents in Evin prison—the same charnel house run by the Shah, I could not buy into the realignment being pushed by MRZine. Indeed, from what I could gather from this sorry online publication, the crackdown on the left was a pretty good thing. If you were familiar with the CPUSA’s defense of the Moscow Trials, you could understand why MRZine would be so anxious to see the “wreckers and splitters” in Iran destroyed.

The latest and most boneheaded example of rote thinking can be found of course in the defense of Qaddafi. This takes either explicit forms such as Chossudovsky publishing an article that stated “People in Libya were rich” or more often an implicit defense on the basis that he was a lesser evil compared to the uprising. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, the opposition was stigmatized as  CIA-inspired even though the same kinds of imperialist connections could be found in the movement against Mubarak and Ben Ali. Qaddafi was given a pass because, like Mugabe, he was a fighter for national independence decades ago. But as a British playwright once put it: “…that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.”

The latest example of rote thinking can be found in today’s Counterpunch. Diana Johnstone, a highly respected (at least in some quarters) specialist on Yugoslavia, has written an article titled “Another NATO Intervention? Libya: Is This Kosovo All Over Again?“. It is a mixture of reasonable anti-imperialist logic plus some of the same nonsense that can be found in all the usual places.

The worst thing about it is that it sweeps the period from 2004 until the February 2011 uprising under the rug. Johnstone claims that Qaddafi has been demonized like Milosevic:

As “the new Hitler”, the man you love to hate and need to destroy, Slobodan Milosevic was a neophyte in 1999 compared to Muammar Qaddafi today.  The media had less than a decade to turn Milosevic into a monster, whereas with Qaddafi, they’ve been at it for several decades.  And Qaddafi is more exotic, speaking less English and coming before the public in outfits that could have been created by John Galliano (another recently outed monster).

If she had been following newspaper coverage on Libya with the same assiduousness as she covered Yugoslavia, she would have not written such nonsense. To start off with, Condoleezza Rice met with Qaddafi in 2008 and said “The relationship has been moving in a good direction for a number of years now, and I think tonight does mark a new phase.” To show how touched he was with his new best friend, Qaddafi showered $212,000 in gifts on her, including a diamond ring and a locket with his own picture inside. If people like Michel Chossudovsky and Diana Johnstone had a better feel for history, none of this would be much of a surprise. Rice’s visit to Libya was virtually the same as Nixon and Kissinger’s to China. It marked a new relationship based on the solid realities of commodity exchange. Qaddafi had come to the conclusion that Western imperialism would be a good partner in oil production in the same fashion as it was in Saudi Arabia or Iraq today. The real analogy was not between Qaddafi and Milosevic but between Qaddafi and Vojislav Kostunica, the neoliberal politician who was determined to realign Serbia as a maquila zone economically and a friend of NATO politically.

Johnstone is particularly upset with the left for joining in the “demonization” of Qaddafi, especially an unnamed Trotskyist group that stated: “Of all the crimes of Qaddafi, the one that is without doubt the most grave and least known is his complicity with the EU migration policy…” She says that “This is a left that ends up, out of sheer confusion, as cheerleader for war.” Unfortunately, she does not provide a citation for this so I am not sure which group it is that I would like to solidarize with. Unlike her, I think this is exactly what should make the left understand that Qaddafi is our enemy.

As my readers should know by now, MRZine and Black Agenda Report have failed to do their due diligence on the question of racism in Libya, claiming falsely that the uprising that began last month ushered in a new phenomenon, namely racist pogroms against Black African workers in Libya. In reality, this is a long-standing problem that existed under Qaddafi, something that Johnstone alluded to but belittled in her commentary. She acknowledges that detention camps for immigrant workers existed but faulted the left for singling that out as a sign that Qaddafi was in league with imperialists, especially his friend the racist Berlusconi who sought to keep Blacks out of Italy. Here’s just one report on the love-fest between the great Pan-Africanist and the right-wing Italian sexist pig:

The European Union is keen to strike a pact with Muammar Gaddafi to stem the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean, officials said today, after the Libyan leader put a price tag of €5bn (£4.1bn) a year on the deal.

“There is great scope to develop cooperation with Libya on migration,” said Matthew Newman, a commission spokesman. Other officials said three negotiating sessions were expected by the end of the year between Brussels and Tripoli as well as the staging of a summit of EU and African leaders in Libya in November.

In a highly theatrical visit to Italy this week, Gaddafi warned that Europe would turn “black” unless it was more rigorous in turning back immigrants. Libya is a key transit point for illegal migration from Africa to Europe. The Libyan leader said the bill for sealing the crossing routes would be at least €5bn a year.

Get that, comrades? Qaddafi warned that Europe would turn “black”. And this fucking (excuse my language) comprador despot is someone who gets the red carpet treatment in Venezuela. As much as I admire Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, this is not something they got right. And the longer they persist in obfuscating things, the worse it will be for them.

The struggle in the Arab world is for democratic rights. That trumps any diplomatic deal struck between Venezuela and Libya. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first came into prominence as activists in the revolutionary upsurge of 1848 that sought to abolish feudal despotism. The ground had to be cleared for battles between the working class and the bourgeoisie. To hasten that showdown it was necessary to fight for a democratic republic with full rights for working people, including the right to form trade unions, to vote and to assemble peacefully. That is exactly the same kinds of battles taking place in the Arab world today and those on the left who oppose it through malicious propaganda are serving the counter-revolution.

Storming Egypt State Security offices