Monday, February 28, 2011

Israel's Security: Then and Now -- Tuesday March 1

From Dr. Robin Gendron:

This is just a reminder that on Tuesday, March 1st  the Nipissing Branch of the Canadian International Council will be holding a discussion of “Israel’s Security: Then and Now.”  Our guest, Dr. David Tal, will compare the threats to its security that Israel faced at its founding 60 years ago with the security situation that it faces in the contemporary Middle East where, unlike in the 1950s, more and more states in the region accept Israel's existence and maintain either peaceful or actual relations with it.  Militarily, the nature of the challenges facing Israel has changed too: conventional wars involving tanks and mass armies are less likely to occur than one involving missiles, air strikes, and attacks on civil population and centers.  Israel will have to find ways to deter and retaliate against non-state threats without using the kind of force it has used in the past.  

The event takes place on Tuesday March 1, starting at 7:00 pm in room F210 (the Fedeli Business Centre).     This event is free and open to the public, and everyone is welcome! Please tell your students in particular.   For more information about this event, please contact Robin Gendron at gendronrs@nipissingu.ca or 705-474-3450 ext 4395.

Two from Loreena Mckennitt



Sunday, February 27, 2011

Video summary of current events in the Middle East

Not a bad presentation.

Religion and politics in the Middle East: the case of Egypt

It certainly is easy enough to believe that people in the Middle East, especially Muslims, are unusually religious, and that there political and social ideas are completely dominated by religious values. Up until January, the previous 30 years might seem to have taught that lesson. Well, now we have had another lesson. Religious organizations and religious values did not drive the Egyptian revolution (outcome still uncertain). Here is a good article from a source I have not used before, Religioscope, that discusses the complexities of the issue. In Egypt at least, the various prominent religious voices spoke out again and again against disorder and the protest movement. One result is that those religious leaders, Christian as well as Muslim, have lost a lot of standing in the eyes of the younger population of Egypt. We can also guess that the civic and nationalistic values proclaimed by the protesters have gained prestige, and not just in Egypt.

Here are some excerpts:
The Salafist movement condemned the protests; the Muslim Brothers first retreated, then got sucked in by the dynamism of the dispute, then tried to open up a negotiation process which the demonstrators, bolder in their demands, didn't want. Though that was not necessarily the position of all Egyptians, many of whom would have settled for a compromise, with Mubarak running the transition and the demand for democracy postponed until the next elections: the voice of the street isn't necessarily the will of the people. The Islamist groups were without doubt the most detached. Among these, various parts of the Salafist movement condemned the demonstrators very clearly from the time of the first appeals.

The official religious institutions, both Muslim (al-Azhar and Dar al-Fatwa) and Christian (the Coptic Church), had ties of allegiance to the regime, and were even further from grasping the new revolutionary spirit.

The grand sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, first supported the regime, then with some difficulty changed course, talking of the demands of the uprising in words that were less aligned to the regime, but extremely late. At the height of the dispute, in early February, the sheikh of al-Azhar called for calm and condemned the deaths of Egyptians – but without saying clearly that the deaths had been part of the confrontation between a regime which had resorted to violence through its usual outlets (the civilian police, the party-state) and young thugs from the poor parts of town. Pope Shenouda, for his part, called on the Christian population throughout the uprising not to join the protests.

The political dependence of the leadership of the clerical institutions – both Christian (the Coptic Church) and Muslim (al-Azhar) – was very badly received by the people, and risked jeopardising their relations with their bases over the long term. This was seen in the anger of young Copts in Tahrir Square at the position taken by Pope Shenouda; the resignation of al-Azhar's vice-spokesman, Mohamed Rifai al-Tahtawi (who then joined the demonstrators on the streets); and the number of al-Azhar preachers and imams who joined the protest movement, wearing their official clothes. The huge numbers who abandoned the official mosques on the Fridays to join the demonstrators showed the crisis of communication between religious establishment and people. Fatwas calling for calm went disregarded. On the Coptic side, many joined the protests, too. Their praying side by side with Muslims in the streets showed a double rejection: a rejection of the regime, but also of the Church's political support for a regime which many Copts feel has done nothing for them; they complain it has been responsible both for growing Islamisation and separation of identities along confessional lines....

The Salafist nebula of groups found itself deeply at odds with the dynamic of the street. From the start, and up to now, its position has been unequivocal: the protest movement must be boycotted because protest means chaos. Better to choose the iniquity of the regime than the void which opposing it might open up (the Salafists base themselves on a fatwa by the medieval Islamic thinker Ibn Taimiyya, affirming that 70 years of iniquitous rule are worth more that one day without rule).

The influential Salafist sheikhs in Egypt, especially those who have established strong positions of influence through the religious satellite television channels (al-Nas, al-Rahma etc), have, however, slightly scaled down their overall objection. As the movement grew, they stopped opposing it and tried to contain it, making do with reminders of the importance of protecting public goods and underlining the need to oppose thugs and gangs.
...
The Muslim Brothers' position evolved under pressure from the street (and not the reverse).

At the start, with the first demonstration on 25 January, the Brothers joined in but only in a symbolic way, sending some very restrained groups from their youth movement. Then, with the “Day of Rage” on 28 January, the Brothers concentrated their efforts on Cairo and mobilized about 100,000 people, according to one of their cadres.

As events unfolded (continued confrontation, massive repression, deaths, resignation of the police, the regime's strategy of chaos), positions radicalized. Mubarak blamed the Brothers for the disturbances. The Brothers in turn, through their supreme guide, Mohamed Badi'a, accused Mubarak of “state terrorism” (the Brothers, according to one of its officials, had suffered nearly 40 deaths). There was a feeling of no return among the Brothers, aware that they would be the main victims of the restoration of order if the protest movement did not succeed. “Our only card is the mobilization in Tahrir Square,” said a Brotherhood cadre who was present in the square. “It has become our life insurance against the swing of the pendulum which awaits us if the regime gets back on its feet.”

The Brothers in Tahrir Square, truly mobilized and strongly influenced by the other groups who started the protest movement, continued to call for Mubarak's departure ahead of any negotiation. But on 5 February, their leadership began talks with then vice president Omar Suleiman, former head of Egyptian intelligence. According to a close observer, the Brotherhood's leadership thought it could not pass up such a chance of winning some sort of recognition, even a legitimate presence. This exasperated the young Brothers out on the streets.
...
The Muslim Brothers did not lead the revolution; and they definitely do not appear as the guardians of its “spirit”. Though its concept may be floating, between Tunis and Cairo we are clearly seeing a revolutionary spirit take shape which could hardly be further from the political culture of the Brothers: it is not programmatic; it does not prefer one ideology over another but demands a transparent framework for political competition; it is anti-authoritarianism; it is democratic and not religious; it functions in a loose logic of networks, spirit of Facebook, transparency (the reverse of a pyramid structure, of secrecy and submission). It bypasses the existing political players in their entirety, including the Muslim Brothers, but recruits among the young of these parties and pushes them beyond their training (the Facebook experience has given birth to a movement, modest but real, of self-criticism and demobilisation of young people who have rejoined a network of existing mobilisations). Revealing, as so much else at Tahrir Square, was the enthusiasm of one young militant working for an Islamist site who rejoiced because the first demos had been led by secular Christians in disagreement with their own Church.
  ...
Through all this, the dynamic of opposition is showing the exhaustion of the authoritarian models of the regimes in place, but also the exhaustion of the traditional forms of opposition to them. What is happening in Egypt is not just the contesting of a regime, but the calling into question of a political culture.
Image:  Perhaps, "the old guys don't speak for us?"
 


A contemplation on the universe

Paul Halsall sent me this link to the Scale of the Universe Interactive Tool.  Enjoy!

Image: Jon Lomberg's reconstruction of the Oort cloud around our solar system.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Sharia and American law

Salon interviews an American Muslim lawyer, Abed Awad, on What sharia law actually means: 

Can you give a couple examples of when sharia has come up in cases that you've handled?


In the past 12 years as an attorney, I have handled many cases with an Islamic law component. U.S. courts are required to regularly interpret and apply foreign law -- including Islamic law -- to everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, probating an Islamic will and the damages element in a commercial dispute. Sharia is relevant in a U.S. court either as a foreign law or as a source of information to understand the expectations of the parties in a dispute.
Suppose a New York resident wife files for divorce in New York; her husband files for annulment in Egypt claiming the parties were never validly married. A New York judge must determine whether he has jurisdiction and whether state law governs this dispute. If the conflict of laws of New York requires that Egyptian law govern the issue of validity, the court would require expert testimony about Egyptian law that is based on Islamic law.
Another common use of sharia in American courts is in the enforcement of Muslim marriage contracts. Like the majority of Americans, Muslims opt for a religious marriage ceremony. In every Muslim marriage, the parties enter into a Muslim marriage contract. The contract includes a provision called mahr, which is a lump sum payment from the groom to the bride that, unless otherwise agreed, would be due at the time of the husband's death or the dissolution of the marriage. An American court would require expert testimony to understand what a mahr is, what a Muslim marriage contract is, and to better understand the expectations of the parties at the time of the contract. All of this would be necessary for the court to determine whether the contract is valid under state law.
Is sharia used in U.S. courts any differently than other foreign or religious systems of law? 
No, it is utilized the same way as Jewish law or canon law or any other law.
A lot of critics of sharia have cited a case in New Jersey in which a husband cited sharia to argue that he did not rape his wife. What happened in that case? 

The case is S.D. v. M.J.R.  It's not about sharia as much as it is about a state court judge who failed to follow New Jersey law. In this case, the plaintiff-wife sought a restraining order against her husband, alleging that his nonconsensual action constituted physical abuse. She testified that her husband told her repeatedly that, according to his religion, she was obligated to submit to his sexual requests.
The trial judge refused to issue the restraining order, finding that the defendant was operating under a religious belief that he was entitled to have marital relations with his wife whenever he wanted. Thus, he did not form the criminal intent to commit domestic violence. But, of course, the appellate court reversed the trial court decision, holding that the defendant's nonconsensual sexual intercourse with his wife was "unquestionably knowing, regardless of his view that his religion permitted him to act as he did." The appellate ruling is consistent with Islamic law, which prohibits spousal abuse, including nonconsensual sexual relations. A minority of Muslims mistakenly believe that a husband can discipline his wife with physical force in the interest of saving the marriage and avoiding divorce.
What about stoning, which critics also claim is part of sharia?
The Quran does not provide for the stoning of adulterers. The punishment prescribed in the Quran is lashing. However, there is a prophetic tradition that adopted the Jewish custom of stoning adulterers. Many people describe the American legal system as having a Judeo-Christian heritage. Does that mean that we will stone adulterers as required in the Bible? No.
As long as a provision in Jewish law, canon law or sharia does not offend our constitutional protections and public policy, courts will consider it. Otherwise, courts would not consider it. In other words, foreign law or religious law in American courts is considered within American constitutional strictures.
What do you make of these state-level efforts to ban consideration of sharia in American courts? 
Other than the fact that such bans are unconstitutional -- a federal court recently held that a ban would likely violate the Supremacy Clause and the First Amendment -- they are a monumental waste of time. Our judges are equipped with the constitutional framework to refuse to recognize a foreign law. In the end, our Constitution is the law of the land.
The only explanation is that they appear to be driven by an agenda infused with hate, ignorance and Islamophobia intent on dehumanizing an entire religious community. That a dozen states are actively moving to adopt anti-sharia laws demonstrates that this is part of a pattern. This is not haphazard. Someone -- a group of people -- is trying to turn this into a national issue. I believe this will become an election issue. Are you with the sharia or with the U.S. Constitution? It is absurd.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Vanity Fair told us: the emperor has clothes



If irresponsible arms running, blowing up passenger planes, and squirreling away billions in oil wealth wasn't enough -- after all, what world leader doesn't do the same?-- Qaddafi was revealed back in 2009 by Vanity Fair as a fashion criminal. Have a look and reflect that an entire country was enslaved to support a dictator's weird self-image.

Of course, if he paid for these outfits out of his pocket, his fashion sense might be defended as performance art. But no, because then he'd have to put up with fashion critics, or maybe even being ignored.

Wherefore Afghanistan?

Tom Englehart reflects on the seeming irrelevance of the conventional wisdom of the "Washington echo chamber" to events in the Middle East, and raises in my mind the question, on what basis can one argue that the Afghan "mission" deserves the priority it currently has in Washington -- and Ottawa?

Monday, February 21, 2011

A follow-up report on Egypt

Abu Muqawama, an American analyst, reflects on the difficulties of moving forward:
Politically, it is correct to note that the Egyptian military has more or less been one with the regime since the 1950s when the Free Officers Revolt replaced the monarchy here. But the military is at the same time in a position it has not been in for 40 years, directly involved with the day-to-day politics and decision-making in Egyptian life. Yezid Sayigh concisely and cogently explained the interests of the Egyptian Army after Mubarak in an op-ed that ran in Financial Times a week before Hosni Mubarak stood down as president... I agree with his analysis of the Egyptian military and have further concerns about the seemingly inevitable clash between its interests and the interests of the young revolutionaries on the streets as well as those of everyday Egyptians who have wildly inflated expectations about life after Mubarak.

First, there is a sense you get that many Egyptians honestly feel the only thing standing in between the Egyptian nation and greatness was the sclerotic Mubarak regime. Now that Muabark is gone, the military -- and whatever government that follows -- will naturally struggle to meet those expectations.

Second, the Egyptian people have now witnessed a dramatic display of people power: mass demonstrations effectively removed from power a man who seemed immovably secure in his post just one month ago. The incentives are there for every group of people in Egypt with a grievance (which is to say everyone) to now strike or demonstrate to see, in effect, what they can get. The military is growing increasingly frustrated with these demonstrations and has ordered them to cease. But the incentive structure is all wrong: even if you don't think you'll get anything, why would you not demonstrate right now? The worst case scenario is, you get nothing. But heck, you might get something!

One of the sources of the military's frustration leads to my third concern, which is the fact that even if the people have a valid grievance, there is no real authority to negotiate with at the moment. Egypt needs a transitional government of some sort, but right now, you've got people agitating for higher wages, back pay, and more reforms on the one hand, and a military on the other hand that is not prepared in the least to hear these concerns and act on them.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Something's happening here...

I could be talking about Wisconsin, which may prove significant, if Americans really are starting to wake up. But let me draw attention instead to a substantial article in Foreign Policy called Revolution U, about an international young people's movement originally out of Serbia (!) which is inventing a new revolutionary non-violence. Inspiring! Dissatisfied Canadians might want to take note.

An excerpt:

Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers.

But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something. But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.

The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers online, but it couldn't organize them once they logged off. It was a useful communication tool to call people to -- well, to what? The April 6 leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Democracy in the Middle East

Its prospects will be much brighter when the chant "Death to so-and-so" is no longer the routine display of opposition.

Saudi Arabia

Thanks to Feed for Arabist.Net for this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Karen Elliott House: From Tunis to Cairo to Riyadh? - WSJ.com:
Thirty years of visiting Saudi Arabia, including intensive reporting over the past four years, convinces me that unless the regime rapidly and radically reforms itself—or is pushed to do so by the U.S.—it will remain vulnerable to upheaval. Despite the conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia is unique, and that billions in oil revenue and an omnipresent intelligence system allow the regime to maintain power by buying loyalty or intimidating its passive populace, it can happen here.

The many risks to the al Saud family's rule can be summed up in one sentence: The gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically as the information gap between rulers and ruled shrinks. The average age of the kingdom's trio of ruling princes is 83, yet 60% of Saudis are under 18 years of age. Thanks to satellite television, the Internet and social media, the young now are well aware of government corruption—and that 40% of Saudis live in poverty and nearly 70% can't afford a home. These Saudis are living Third World lives, suffering from poor education and unable to find jobs in a private sector where 90% of all employees are imported non-Saudis. Through new media the young compare their circumstances unfavorably with those in nearby Gulf sheikhdoms and the West.
It strikes me that the world as a whole is suffering from a case of a surprisingly small number of really old guys hogging the vast wealth of the modern world, while the young scramble for scraps.   Search for "United States economic inequality" and see what pops up.

Cheese, Pears and History in a Proverb

I don't think anyone will mind if I repost this charming review from The Medieval Review.

Montanari, Massimo. Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Pp. 128. $26.50/£18.50.
ISBN: 978-0-231-15250-1.

 Reviewed by Paul Freedman
      Yale University
      paul.freedman@yale.edu


Even in an age of narcissism and first-person journalism it isn't
customary for reviewers of scholarly literature to put themselves
forward before getting around to reviewing the book at hand.
Nevertheless I feel compelled to say at the outset that this short
study (90 pages plus bibliographic references), for all that its
subject is completely new to me, encapsulates almost uncannily my own
interests over the last few years as it concerns gastronomy
(especially its social symbolism), seigneurial representations of the
peasantry (along with some attention to peasant opinions of their
masters as well), and the peculiar power and durability of proverbs.
Montanari starts out as if he is going to offer a micro-history of one
somewhat puzzling maxim, but the book turns into something
considerably more complex as it describes the reversibility and
circularity of our perceptions and articulations of reality.

Along with the late Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari has been a
pioneer in the study of medieval as well as modern cuisine.  He has
discussed changing fashions in food and how these tastes were shaped
by considerations of social distinction. Food conveyed social claims
and status in the Middle Ages and this remains true now even if the
specific items have taken on new symbolic meanings.  One era's fish
waste might be another's caviar; organ meats and root vegetables are
suddenly chic after decades of lowliness.

We begin with an old but still current Italian aphorism: "Do not let
the peasant know how good cheese is with pears".  The ensuing
investigation analyzes this bit of advice whose actual meaning is not
at all clear, despite the widespread popularity of the saying
throughout Italy and similar formulations elsewhere in Europe.
Proverbs are usually supposed to be distillations of folk or lower-
class wisdom. Sancho Panza is given to proverbial observations, so
much so that the usually oblivious Don Quixote curses him and asks for
sixty thousand devils to take him away along with his irritating
sayings.  Sam Gamgee doesn't annoy Frodo to the same degree in Lord
of the Rings
, although he makes frequent down-to-earth gnomic
observations, sometimes citing his father's authority for them. Yet
the humorous warning about cheese and the pears expresses contempt for
ordinary people voiced by a person of superior rank even if
historically its use was not limited to the privileged classes but
rather was always well-known to peasants.

The combination of pears and cheese is hardly counter-intuitive nor an
intrinsic mystery. As early as the thirteenth century a French saying
asserts that God never made such a blessed marriage (Onques Deus ne
fist tel mariage / Comme de poire et de fromage
). Montanari notes
that in 2007, a town in Friuli famous for its cheese was twinned with
one in Emilia-Romagna noted for pears. The first introduction of an
anti-peasant aspect to this pairing comes in the late sixteenth
century: "May you never know, peasant, what it is to eat bread, cheese
and pears" (Non possa tu mai villano sapere / Cio ch'è mangiar
pane, cacio e pere
).

However tasty pears and cheese are, setting them side-by-side is odd
for a proverb with explicit class implications because cheese was a
typical peasant food while pears were aristocratic delicacies.
Montanari devotes the first part of the book to the medieval attitudes
towards the two items.  Cheese was avoided by the upper classes as a
crude and unhealthful peasant staple until the fifteenth century when
in Italy a fashion for dressing up simple dishes and hierarchical
ranking of certain cheeses as prestigious made cheese more common in
aristocratic entertaining.  Noble consumption of cheese remained
distinct from peasant patterns since for the latter cheese was a main
ingredient of a meal while for the well-off, cheese and fruit
comprised a small course to close a meal.

Unlike cheese, pears were always considered desirable, as were all
tree fruit.  They are, or at least seemed to be, particularly
delicate, easily bruised and spoiled and so prized for their
fragility.  In fact, however, some varieties are tough enough to be
stored in winter, but these hardy fruit were avoided by those with
some choice in the matter.  Pears were commonly gifts made between
nobles, so that for example the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua gave away
their own early-ripening precoce di Moglia pears to their
friends.

Different in social cachet, pears and cheese were nevertheless equal
objects of medical disapproval, cheese because of its heaviness and
supposed indigestibility (common to most peasant fare such as beans or
root vegetables), and pears because of their humorally cold nature
which endangered the stomach. Doctors reluctantly allowed the
consumption of cooked fruit while cheese also achieved a grudgingly
accorded medical respectability.  Cheese came to be seen as variable
in its properties and so capable of being matched with different
personal temperaments as argued by Pantaleone da Confienza in his
late-fifteenth century Summa laticiniorum whose composition
marks the advance of cheese into elite consideration.

The turning point of Montanari's intricate book is the introduction of
the social differentiation of gastronomic taste.  The notion of fixed,
class- appropriate foods is particularly important to the seigneurial
image of the lowly, even bestial rustic.  It's not only that peasants
depend on porridge, dairy products or onions for their sustenance, but
that this is their "natural" fodder.  Even when given the opportunity
to consume better fare they cannot tolerate refined food any more than
nobles can readily digest the crude provender of agricultural
laborers.  There are many medieval stories about well-off peasants who
marry into the upper classes and cannot adapt themselves to the diet
appropriate to their new status.  Montanari cites the example of the
wily Bertraldo, a successful rustic who met a bad end at court because
of the exquisite food he had to eat.  Once he fell ill he begged the
doctors to bring him beans simmered with onions and turnips cooked
under ashes, but as they did not comply, he died.  Other examples have
a happier ending as the upstart peasant's wasting indigestion is
suddenly relieved when he is provided with beans and peas with soaked
bread, or cheese, or leeks and onions.

Taste and social status are, in fact, malleable and shifting despite
the efforts of medieval anecdotes to present food preference as fixed
by nature and class.  On a basic level it would seem that cheese is a
rustic staple while pears are an aristocratic fancy, but the ascent of
cheese to a position of gustatory prestige shows that reputations can
change.  The real fear seems to have been that the more successful
peasants would be able not only to tolerate but enjoy things deemed
inappropriate to their rank.  The proverb about the pears and cheese
expresses a common noble and urban dislike of peasants not so much in
their traditional rural squalor but as socially mobile and newly
enfranchised.

The proverb is a bit more complicated, however.  It is not as if the
peasants didn't know what pears were, after all.  Medieval and early
modern rustics were responsible not only for cheese-making but for
taking care of fruit trees as well.  Pears were not like spices,
purchased as imported luxuries and so relatively (but by no means
completely) unavailable to the lower orders.  Even if peasants had
somehow discovered that cloves were delicious, they could hardly have
done anything with this knowledge, while if they knew how felicitous
the matching of pears and cheese was, they would start stealing,
holding back or otherwise appropriating the pears in their custody.

There are still additional layers to this seemingly simple saying and
in a final section Montanari shows us something about the flexibility
of this maxim and indeed of all proverbial wisdom despite, or because
of the aphorisms' pithily authoritative statements of the way the
world is.  It is not enough to find out the "origin" of a saying but
to see who says it, who can say it and with what polyvalent
overtones.  If the peasants already know about pears and cheese, then
in their enunciation the proverb has a rather amusing set of meanings
that might range from the fatuousness of upper-class claims to special
knowledge to expressing the comic degradation of worldly wisdom too
widely disseminated (consider the fate of the modern American cliché
that the three most important price factors in real estate are
"location, location, location," which once counted as serious advice
but is now risible).

This brief summary of the ins and outs of Montanari's argument only
peels the skin off the proverbial pear.  Cheese, Pears, and
History
is a marvelous book whose brevity reveals twists and
surprises in its carefully reasoned observations and conclusions.

Image:  Blue cheese, pears...and choclate!  From Coffeeandvanilla.com.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Secret History of Democracy is out!

I have heard from one of the editors that the book The Secret History of Democracy is out.  I have an article in it:  "Republics and Quasi-Democratic Institutions in Ancient India."  Phil Paine has one, too, on Metis institutions on the Canadian praries: "The Hunters who Owned Themselves."

The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, has a promotional web page with links to the full table of contents, a sample chapter, and other supporting materials.

Prize winning photos at the Big Picture

An Indonesian man wears a mask against volcanic ash; and much more. (Click for a bigger view.)

Monday, February 14, 2011

Egypt: the role of the Muslim Brotherhood

This is too good not to cite.

From Brian's Coffeehouse:

The Muslim Brotherhood's support for democracy is not a momentary tactic, but has roots in its theological foundations. The group draws on the traditional of Islamic reformism associated with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the 19th century, which taught that instead of traditional Islamic jurisprudence, Muslims should rely on contemporary interpretation of the Qur'an and hadith. These modern interpretations can be harsh and puritanical, as well as liberal, and the Muslim Brotherhood has interpreted criminal law, for example, fairly literally. Politically, however, a key principle is "shura," or consultation, which at least since the Young Ottomans opposed to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-1800's has for many carried connotations of democracy. Richard Mitchell, whose 1969 book on the Muslim Brotherhood remains a standard, explained it thus:
"'The nation,' 'the people,' in fact, are the source of all the ruler's authority: 'The nation alone is the source of power; bowing to its will is a religious obligation.' The ruler has no legal existence and deserves no loyalty except as 'he reflects the spirit of the society and is in harmony with its goals.' Banna described the relationship of ruler and ruled as a 'social contract' in which the ruler is defined as a 'trustee' and 'agent'...Since the ruler is the 'agent contracted for' by the nation, he is 'elected' by it."

Not all or even most of the specific systems of government proposed under this framework could be called "democratic," as many involve religious tests for office, limited electorates, and clerical councils with important powers, but the point I make is that for the Brotherhood, there is no break between advocating democracy and core political theory.

In the present context, I'm not even convinced that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to exercise power....

If there is a related concern going forward in Egypt, it does not involve the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization, but rather the generally illiberal impulses of Egyptian society. The specific form of Islamic Revivalism involving puritanical intolerant religious ideas has been growing steadily in Egypt for many years.... One factor seems to be returning guest workers from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. Migration from conservative rural areas to the cities is also spreading that conservatism through urban society. ...

Most important, however, is the sudden upsurge of new, competing ideologies and paths to dignity and meaning in life. I don't have the materials at hand to provide concrete examples, but I was struck by the way in which the reasons many protesters gave for wanting to participate in the uprising paralleled those of people attending conservative shari'a classes at their local mosque. This passage by Mohammed Bamyeh is kind of what I mean:
"Third, remarkable was the virtual replacement of religious references by civic ethics that were presumed to be universal and self-evident. This development appears more surprising than in the case of Tunisia, since in Egypt the religious opposition had always been strong and reached virtually all sectors of life. The Muslim Brotherhood itself joined after the beginning of the protests, and like all other organized political forces in the country seemed taken aback by the developments and unable to direct them, as much as the government (along with its regional allies) sought to magnify its role.

"This, I think, is substantially connected to the two elements mentioned previously, spontaneity and marginality. Both of those processes entailed the politicization of otherwise unengaged segments, and also corresponded to broad demands that required no religious language in particular. In fact, religion appeared as an obstacle, especially in light of the recent sectarian tensions in Egypt, and it contradicted the emergent character of the Revolution as being above all dividing lines in society, including one’s religion or religiosity. Many people prayed in public, of course, but I never saw anyone being pressured or even asked to join them, in spite of the high spiritual overtones of an atmosphere saturated with high emotions and constantly supplied by stories of martyrdom, injustice, and violence.

"Like in the Tunisian Revolution, in Egypt the rebellion erupted as a sort of a collective moral earthquake—where the central demands were very basic, and clustered around the respect for the citizen, dignity, and the natural right to participate in the making of the system that ruled over the person. If those same principles had been expressed in religious language before, now they were expressed as is and without any mystification or need for divine authority to justify them. I saw the significance of this transformation when even Muslim Brotherhood participants chanted at some point with everyone else for a 'civic' (madaniyya) state—explicitly distinguished from two other possible alternatives: religious (diniyya) or military (askariyya) state."

CIC-Nipissing: Afghanistan and Beyond

The Nipissing Branch of the Canadian International Council is pleased to announce that on February 17th it will be holding “An Evening with Master Corporal Mike Trauner: Afghanistan and Beyond.”  Our guest, MCpl Mike Trauner, will speak about his experiences serving with the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan as well as his recovery from the serious wounds he received while there.

The event takes place on Thursday February 17, starting at 6:30 pm in room F210 (the Fedeli Business Centre) at Nipissing University. 

MCpl Trauner has served 13 years with the infantry.  He lost both his legs and partial use of one arm after stepping on an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Afghanistan.  He recently received the "To the Top Canada" award due to his determination to live a normal life, the example he presents to others and his drive to help others.  He also raised the Paralympic international flag in Vancouver at the 2010 Winter Olympics.  His presentation will be less formal as he generally speaks candidly and from the heart about his experiences.  He will speak about his injury, the recovery process, what he misses from his past life, how he copes, successes, his interpretation of "Proud to be Canadian" and his future goals (politics).

This event is free and open to the public, and everyone is welcome!

Keep in mind as well that on Tuesday March 1st, the CIC-Nipissing will also welcome Dr. David Tal of the University of Calgary who will be discussing 'Israel's Security: Then and Now.'

For more information about either of these events, please contact Robin Gendron at gendronrs@nipissingu.ca or 705-474-3450 ext 4395.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Are you smarter than Thomas Jefferson? (My 2000th blog post)

TomDispatch.com is devoted to "resisting empire" by describing aspects of our world that no one else wants to talk about.  It can get pretty depressing in there:  you have to feel strong to immerse yourself in a TomDispatch essay.  (Are you strong enough for this one?)

But a recent piece by actor and dramatist Wallace Shaun goes far beyond the norm.  Key excerpts from Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage? follow.

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.

Actors are treated as uncanny beings by non-actors because of the strange voyage into themselves that actors habitually make, traveling outside the small territory of traits that are seen by their daily acquaintances as “them.” Actors, in contrast, look at non-actors with a certain bewilderment, and secretly think: What an odd life those people lead! Doesn’t it get a bit—claustrophobic?...
I’ve sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a “selection,” choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these “selections” are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.

As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label “factory worker” and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she’ll crawl out of the pit, and she’ll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she’ll stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day... And it’s not that anyone sadly concluded when she was born that she lacked the talent to become, let’s say, a violinist, a conductor, or perhaps another Beethoven. The reason she was sent to the factory and not to the concert hall was not that she lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so she was assigned to be one.
 And during the period when all the babies who are born have been sorted into their different categories and labeled, during the period when you could say that they’re being nourished in their pens until they’re ready to go to work, they’re all assigned appropriate costumes. And once they know what costume they’ll wear, each individual is given an accent, a way of speaking, some characteristic personality traits, and a matching body type, and each person’s face starts slowly to specialize in certain expressions which coordinate well with their personality, body type, and costume. And so each person comes to understand what role he will play, and so each can consistently select and reproduce, through all the decades and changes of fashion, the appropriate style and wardrobe, for the rest of his life...
Image:  Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (dramatized).

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Egypt: you say you want a revolution?

You should be so lucky to have one like this: The people (please, it is no mob) return to Tahrir Square -- to clean up the mess. Go to the BBC site and hear them speak

It's out there

Matt Laur at History Nerd refers us to this RSAnimate piece on "mutual knowledge."  Fun! Relevant!

And there are more out there.  I tell ya, animators rule!

Friday, February 11, 2011

Egypt: how they did it

The Wall Street Journal explains how the Cairo demonstrations began, how the demonstrators outsmarted the police.

For a great photo of a Cairo sweet shop by Dan Bryan, go here.

Nipissing's Model NATO Team offers a debate on Egypt, Monday Feb. 14


This coming Monday the Political Science Department and Model NATO Team will be hosting a debate. The title is "Destabilization & Failing States: A NATO Perspective,  Case Study: Egypt 2011".

Main themes to be discussed is NATO's personal interests in stability in the region in contrast to the international communities support for democratization and liberty.

Perspectives from the US, Canada, Turkey, France, and Germany will be provided.

After the debate there will be a Q & A session for students to voice their concerns or comments.

The event will be from 1-2pm in F213 (the theater) Monday February 14th.

Image:  the Model NATO clubhouse.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Immanuel Wallerstein: The global economy is like, over

Back in the 1980s, when it was incumbent upon me to come to some understanding of world history (so I could teach it!), Wallerstein was one of the people I read. He had a huge, detailed, Marxist-inspired theory of everything, with emphasis on the expansion of Europe.  The main virtue of his work for me was the fact that he did know a great deal about a great deal, and I benefited from exposure to it, even while I was rather wary of the Marxist framework.

So, when so eminent a theorist of the global economy (or the modern world-system) says it's over, I have to be interested:
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW OR EVER


Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees that the world has been in some kind of economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith.

But it is wrong. All systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist world-economy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at least a century encompassed the entire globe. It has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in structural crisis.

The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle.

What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.

The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and egalitarian.

The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.

Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.
Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
Image: ah, the days when I could just swallow such books whole.

The complexities of the Egyptian revolution

A long piece that can be taken as an argument that this is a revolution with strong roots in a changing Egyptian society.  Paul Amar on Aljazeera English.

Some interesting excerpts:


The Brothers now fully support political pluralism, women’s participation in politics and the role of Christians and communists as full citizens. However, with the rise of other competing labour, liberal and human-rights movements in Egypt in the 2000s, what one can call the "new old guard" of the Brotherhood - those that emerged in the 1980s - have retained a primary focus on cultural, moral and identity politics. Moral-cultural conservatism is still seen by this group as what distinguishes the Brotherhood from other parties - a fact they confirmed by appointing a rigid social conservative, Muhammad Badeea, as leader in 2010.

This turn was rejected by women and youth in the movement. This socially conservative leaning thus brings the "new old guard" more in line with the moralistic paternalism of Mubarak's government - and set them against the trajectory of new youth, women's and labour movements. This leads to new possibilities of splits in this organisation or for exciting revitalisation and reinvention of the Brotherhood - as Youth and Women’s wings feel drawn toward the April 6 coalition.

The moral-cultural traditionalist wing of the "new old guard", is composed of professional syndicate leaders and wealthy businessmen. In the 1950s-80s, the movement regrouped and represented frustrated elements of the national bourgeoisie. But this class of people has largely been swept up into new opportunities and left the organisation. The "new old guard" of the Brotherhood’s business wing has started to look like a group of retired Shriners, except that in the Middle East, Shriners have stopped wearing fez.

In the past ten years, this political force of this particular wing has been partially co-opted by Mubarak's government from two angles. First, Brothers were allowed to enter parliament as independent candidates and have been allowed to participate in the recent economic boom. The senior Brothers now own major cell phone companies and real estate developments - and have been absorbed into the NDP machine and upper-middle class establishment for years. Second, the government wholly appropriated the Brotherhood's moral discourse.

For the past ten or fifteen years Mubarak’s police-state has stirred moral panics and waved the banner of Islam, attacking single working women, homosexuals, devil-worshipping internet users, trash-recycling pig farmers, rent-control squatters - as well as Bahai, Christian and Shia minorities. In its morality crusades, the Mubarak government burned books, harassed women, and excommunicated college professors. Thus, we can say that Egypt has already experienced rule by an extremely narrow Islamist state – Mubarak's. Egyptians tried out that kind of regime. And they hated it.
In recent years, as described in the work of Saba Mahmood and Asef Bayat, people have grown disgusted by Mubarak's politicisation of Islam. Egyptians began to reclaim Islam as a project of personal self-governance, ethical piety, and social solidarity. This trend explicitly rejects the political orientation of Islam and explicitly separates itself both from Brotherhood activities and Mubarak's morality crusades.
 ...

Suleiman’s General Intelligence Services are nominally part of the military - but are institutionally quite separate. Intelligence is dependent on foreign patrons, primarily Israel and the US, and are looked on skeptically by Egyptians. But the Air Force and Army are quite grounded in the economic and social interests of national territory. The army’s role in countering Suleiman’s lust for repression was crucial to saving the momentum of this uprising.

On February 4, the day of the most terrifying police/thug brutality in Tahrir Square, many commentators noted that the military were trying to stop the thug attacks but were not being very forceful or aggressive. Was this a sign that the military really wanted the protesters to be crushed? Since then, we have learned that the military in the square were not provisioned with bullets. The military were trying as best they could to battle the police/thugs - but Suleiman had taken away their bullets for fear the military would side with the protesters and use the ammunition to overthrow him.

Bullets or no, the military displaced the police, who had stripped off their uniforms and regressed into bands of thugs. Security in Cairo's public spaces has been taken over by the military - and in residential quarters we witnessed the return of a 21st century version of futuwwa groups. As Wilson Jacob has described, in the 19th century futuwwa were icons of working-class national identity and community solidarity in Egypt.

Futuwwa were organised groups of young men who defended craft guilds and the working-class neighbourhoods of Cairo. But the futuwwa reborn on February 1, 2011 are called Peoples’ Committees and include men of all classes and ages - and a few women with butcher's knives, too. They stake out every street corner, vigilant for police and state-funded thugs who would try to arrest, intimidate or loot residents. Given the threat of sexualised physical violence from Mubarak's police/thugs, there is a gender dimension to this re-imagining and redeployment of security and military power during this uprising. In the first days of the uprising we saw huge numbers of women participating in the revolt.

Then the police/thugs started targeting women in particularly horrifying ways - molesting, detaining, raping. And when the police were driven back, the military and the futuwwa groups took over and insisted that "protecting" the people from thugs involved filtering women and children out of Tahrir and excluding them from public space. But women in this revolt have insisted that they are not victims who need protection, they are the leading core of this movement. On February 7, women’s groups - including the leftist April 6 national labour movement, as well as anti-harassment, civil rights groups and the Women’s Wing of the Brotherhood reemerged in force in downtown Cairo - by the hundreds of thousands.
 ...
It is crucial to remember that this uprising did not begin with the Muslim Brotherhood or with nationalist businessmen. This revolt began gradually at the convergence of two parallel forces: the movement for workers' rights in the newly revived factory towns and micro-sweatshops of Egypt - especially during the past two years - and the movement against police brutality and torture that mobilised every community in the country for the past three years. Both movements feature the leadership and mass participation of women of all ages and youth of both genders. There are structural reasons for this.

First, the passion of workers that began this uprising does not stem from their marginalisation and poverty; rather, it stems from their centrality to new development processes and dynamics. In the very recent past, Egypt has reemerged as a manufacturing country, although under the most stressful and dynamic of conditions. Egypt's workers are mobilised because new factories are being built in the context of a flurry of contentious global investment. Several Russian free-trade zones and manufacturing settlements have opened up, and China has invested in all parts of the Egyptian economy.

Brazil, Turkey, the Central Asian Republics and the Gulf Emirates are diversifying their investments. They are moving out of the oil sector and real estate and into manufacturing, piece-goods, informatics, infrastructure etc. Factories all over Egypt have been dusted off and reopened, or new ones built. And all those shopping malls, gated cities, highways and resorts have to be built and staffed by someone. In the Gulf, developers use Bangladeshi, Philippine and other expatriate labour. But Egypt usually uses its own workers. And many of the workers in Egypt's revived textile industries and piece-work shops are women.

If you stroll up the staircases into the large working-class apartment buildings in the margins of Cairo or the cement-block constructions of the villages, you’ll see workshops full of women, making purses and shoes - and putting together toys and computer circuitboards for sale in Europe, the Middle East and the Gulf. These shop workers joined with factory workers to found the April 6 movement in 2008. They were the ones who began the organisation and mobilisation process that led to this uprising in 2011, whose eruption was triggered by Asmaa Mahfouz circulating a passionate YouTube video and tens of thousands of leaflets by hand in slum areas of Cairo on January 24, 2011. Ms Mahfouz, a political organiser with an MBA from Cairo University, called people to protest the next day. And the rest is history.

The economic gender and class landscape of Egypt’s micro-businesses has been politicised and mobilised in very dynamic ways, again with important gender and sexual dimensions. Since the early 1990s, Egypt has cut back welfare and social services to working-class and lower-middle-class Egyptians. In place of food subsidies and jobs they have offered debt. Micro-credit loans were given, with the IMF and World Bank's enthusiastic blessing, to stimulate entrepreneurship and self-reliance. These loans were often specifically targeted toward women and youth.

Since economically disadvantaged applicants have no collateral to guarantee these loans, payback is enforced by criminal law rather than civil law. This means that your body is your collateral. The police extract pain and humiliation if you do not pay your bill. Thus the micro-enterprise system has become a massive set of police rackets and "loan shark" operations. Police sexualised brutalisation of youth and women became central to the "regulation" of the massive small-business economy.

In this context, the micro-business economy is a tough place to operate - but it does shape women and youth into tough survivors who see themselves as an organised force opposed to the police state. No one waxes on about the blessings of the market's invisible hand. Thus the economic interests of this mass class of micro-entrepreneurs are the basis for the huge and passionate anti-police brutality movement. It is no coincidence that the movement became a national force two years ago with the brutal police murder of a youth, Khalid Said, who was typing away in a small internet cafe that he partially owned. Police demanded ID and a bribe from him; he refused - and the police beat him to death, crushing his skull to pieces while the whole community watched in horror.

Police demanding bribes, harassing micro-businesses - and beating those who refuse to submit - became standard practise in Egypt. Internet cafes, small workshops, call-centres, video-game cafes, microbuses, washing/ironing shops and small gyms constitute the landscape of micro-enterprises that are the jobs base and social world of Egypt's lower middle classes. The so-called "Facebook revolution" is not about people mobilising in virtual space; it is about Egyptian internet cafes and the youth and women they represent, in real social spaces and communities, utilising the cyberspace bases they have built and developed to serve their revolt.

All of this almost invisible to outsiders; but crucial.

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Democracy in the Arab world


Via Matt Laur (HIST 3805's "History Nerd"), an opinion piece by ex-ambassador Jeremy Kinsman:
Almost invariably in these cases, who prevails depends on the role of the army.
The army's refusal to fire on demonstrators in Kiev in the Orange Revolution (2004) was decisive, as it was in Tunisia and may prove to be the case in Egypt.

But at Tiananmen in 1989, as in Rangoon (2007) and Tehran (2009), the army and security forces acted with cruel brutality. In those places, the military's loyalty to the status quo was driven by its own self-interest in the existing regimes.

One of the factors that is often overlooked in these cases is the role played by military mentoring.
The Ukrainian officers on the Maidan in 2004 had been integrating into NATO programs for a decade and knew that the correct role of the military in a democracy was to protect all the people.

In the case of Egypt, its military has extremely close ties with its U.S. counterparts and which are bound up in the $38 billion of military aid Egypt has received from Washington since 1978, when the Camp David Accords were signed.

In fact, the Egyptian chief of defence staff was on a regular consultation in Washington just two weeks ago, as this latest drama was beginning to unfold.

No one is claiming the U.S. military could order the viscerally nationalistic Egyptian army to refuse to obey if Mubarak ordered the use of force against the protestors.

But after years of beneficial ties with an American military whose all-out support for anti-Communist dictators is long behind it, Egypt's military leaders would have known right from wrong.
...Another lesson from these events is that for a massive popular protest to succeed, it must be non-violent.

Violence scares off the wide swath of solid citizens and generally brings the army in on the side of shutting down the show.

In these situations, desperate authoritarian regimes often try to foment violence, through the use of agents provocateurs, to stimulate a backlash and justify repressing the protests.

We saw some evidence of that last week in Egypt, but this time the opposition was ready.
Ready, because for years now Egyptian activists have been attending workshops on non-violent discipline sponsored by international human rights groups; and conducted by such stalwarts as Saad Ibrahim, who was himself jailed and tortured in Egyptian prisons after having run against Mubarak a decade ago.
Image:  another good catch by Matt.

Monday, February 07, 2011

This is what it costs



New York Magazine:

The Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Effexor, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan, Restoril, Xanax, Adderall, Ritalin, Haldol, Risperdal, Seroquel, Ambien, Lunesta, Elavil, Trazodone War

The first time I meet David Booth, a 39-year-old former medic and surgeon’s assistant who retired this past spring after nineteen years in the active Army Reserve, I make the awkward mistake of proposing we go out to lunch. It seems a natural suggestion. The weather is still warm, and he has told me to meet him in the lobby of his office downtown, so I assume he wants to go out, not back to his desk, when I show up around noon. But it turns out that in the six months he has been at his job, Booth has never left his office in the middle of the day, except to run across the street, and he is simply too polite to say so. From the moment we step outside, it’s clear how unusual this excursion is for him. As we walk, he hews close to the buildings on his right (“If a building’s to my right, no one is going to walk by me on my right”), and when we arrive at the restaurant, he quietly takes a seat at the table closest to the door, his back against the wall. His large brown eyes immediately start darting around.

“How’s your sleep?” I ask him.

“I don’t,” he answers.

Image: A portrait by Louis Palu.

Historical/geographical trivia master, are you?

See how much of this you know!

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Scott Caple exhibit in Toronto, February 25, 2011

As a bit of relief from very serious matters, I pass along this invitation from Scott Caple, an extraordinarily talented artist and animator:
I am having a SHOW in Downtown Toronto , at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop, 486 College St. / Friday Feb. 25 / 7-11. It 's going to be a show of layout and design work from past projects I 've worked on -Incredibles, Hunchback, the Bluth movies, maybe even some Nelvana stuff - plus some personal work. Some will be original , some won't. But there WILL be refreshments and good conversation. And signed prints for sale!
If you can, go!

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Interest groups in Egypt

A detailed discussion at Aljazeera English:

The "March of Millions" in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt. This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured) mass movements of youth, labour, women's and religious groups. President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, January 28.

On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak's ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak's curfew order, it was clear that the old president been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilisations into their military, economic and social context. What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centred government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?

And:


Eygptian internationalism  
       

One final element to examine here is the critical, and often overlooked role that Egypt has played in United Nations and humanitarian organizations, and how this history is coming back to enliven domestic politics and offer legitimacy and leadership at this time. Muhammad ElBaradei, the former director of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, has emerged as the consensus choice of the United Democratic Front in Egypt, which is asking him to serve as interim president, and to preside over a national process of consensus building and constitution drafting. In the 2000s, ElBaradei bravely led the IAEA and was credited with confirming that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapons program.

He won the Nobel Prize for upholding international law against a new wave of wars of aggression and for essentially stopping the momentum for war against Iran. He is no radical and not Egypt’s Gandhi; but he is no pushover or puppet of the US, either. For much of the week, standing at his side at the protests has been Egyptian actor Khaled Abou Naga, who has appeared in several Egyptian and American films, and who serves as Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. This may be much more a UN-humanitarian led revolution than a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. This is a very twenty-first century regime change – simultaneously local and international.
Image:  Tahrir Square

Friday, February 04, 2011

And people complain about Aljazeera!

James Fallows via Brad de Long:

As I never tire of saying, China Daily is my favorite newspaper in the world.
But it's conceivable that not every visitor to the Washington Post's web site would know the reason for my fondness and loyalty. China Daily is the state-controlled English-language voice of the Chinese government to the outside world. Sometimes this makes it a useful source of intel about the line the government wants to push. For instance, its recent revelation that "most nations" opposed the choice of Liu Xiaobo as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Very often the hyper-earnestness of its approach makes it a delight. For example, here and here, or my favorite of all headlines, "Happiness abounds as country cheers."

Recently the Washington Post has started carrying China Daily's US edition as a physically separate advertising supplement to the printed paper, as described here. Fine: it's clearly labeled, and we've all gotta stay in business. But now the Post is doing the same thing on its website. Look at this part of the "Washington Post"'s site as it appears just now, and tell me how obvious it is that you're seeing a paid presentation of official Chinese government propaganda perspective...

A West Village (NYC) cocktail lounge (circa 1940-70)


From Ephemeral New York, a very good site.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

The "Third Forces," South Africa's transition and Egypt

David Africa at Aljazeera English:

 The apparently sudden and unexpected violence against Egyptian protesters that started on February 2 has an interesting historical ring to it. The date marks the unbanning of liberation movements in South Africa in 1990, and the start of political negotiations between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress. It also marks the start of the most violent period in South Africa’s turbulent political history.

The parallels with Egypt start with Mubarak’s speech to the nation on February 1, ostensibly making a significant concession to the protesters and a commitment to Egypt’s democratic future. The next day thugs, many now clearly identified as members of the security forces, rallied in central Cairo and launched attacks on hitherto peaceful demonstrators.

The tactics of deploying so-called third forces is a tried and tested method of autocratic regimes, usually utilised when the regime realises that it is on the strategic defencive politically. The focus of the regime then shifts from merely ruling as usual to extending its reign as long as possible, while at the same time sapping the material and political energy of its opponents.

In South Africa this tactic was intended to legitimise the regime as the only thing standing between an orderly transition to democracy on the one hand, and chaos on the other. At the same time it sought to drain the energy of the liberation movement by killing some of its leaders, forcing it into a defencive mode of thinking and compelling it to accept a compromise favourable to the regime. Mubarak’s statements prior to the unleashing of his ‘police-in-civilian clothing’, the inaction of the army and the apparently reasonable response of his Prime Minister after the fact that they will vigorously investigate the violence and bring the perpetrators to book, are well rehearsed elements of a ‘third force’ strategy...
Unless the army intervenes on the side of the Egyptian democracy movement, this ‘third force’ will continue to strike, not only in Cairo and other cities but increasingly also in the rural parts of the country. In South Africa the third force violence lasted from 1990 to 1994. In Egypt Mubarak’s regime has until September to produce a disorganised, leaderless and desperate opposition unable to execute a proper election campaign. The lessons of South Africa are instructive in how to defeat this effort by a desperate regime.

The continued unity of South Africans, in protest, was the central element that defeated the efforts of the apartheid regime to continue governing. If the Egyptian people continue protesting, as they have for the last two weeks, any claims of legitimacy by the regime are transparently ridiculous. In South Africa the central demand of the liberation movement at the height of third force violence became one for a transitional government.

No autocratic regime can oversee its own demise, and a real election could only take place if the entire state apparatus, including its security forces, were placed under the control of an interim government. The South African Transitional Executive Council established in 1993 and acting as an interim government, ensured the holding of free and fair elections in April 1994.
Anything less than the departure of Mubarak and his key allies will mean a transition always under threat of violence by a so-called third force, and an election that might disappear amidst the violence visited upon the Egyptian resistance.

Torture as a leading issue in Egypt?

So argues this writer at Aljazeera English:

The pro-democracy uprising was propelled by a non-partisan coalition of young activists, who at long last tapped into a current of popular revulsion at the police-state techniques that the regime used to maintain its grip on power.
Whose public interest?
The opposition parties have a role to play in creating an alternative to Mubarak's rule. They are not necessarily well prepared to play this role after decades of hopeless marginalisation by the ruling NDP.
In order to bring about structural change to Egyptian politics they will have to focus not on the social context that makes regime's downfall possible (police state suppression, unemployment and poverty), but on Egypt's laws and constitution.
An end to torture as a primary tactic for maintaining the regime's power will require reforms in a legal system that combines powers of criminal prosecution with police investigation. These two functions are separate in the legal systems of Europe and the United States, but combined in Egypt and in many socialist countries.
The result in Egypt is that the office of public prosecutor (al-niyaba al-‘amma) has the authority to gather evidence in the criminal cases that it pursues. This would be considered an obvious conflict of interest in the United States.
In Egypt it means that a prosecutor who represents "the public interest" (aka the state) possesses powers of police investigation. This leads to systematic torture justified on grounds of it being "in the public interest".
It is no coincidence that when the power of the state was broken on the "day of rage" (January 28th), the pro-democracy protesters attacked many police stations throughout the country.
Police stations, not just the ministry of interior's Central Security Forces, were targeted because the Egyptian public has been subject to systematic torture by a police-judiciary nexus throughout the 30 years of Mubarak's rule.

History Seminar Series: Andrew Taylor, University of Ottawa, speaks on oral tradition and written record

From Dr. Derek Neal:

Our next History Department seminar will feature University of Ottawa medievalist Andrew Taylor, who will speak on:
Written Record to Memory: Delgamuukw vs. British Columbia and the Modern Historian

Friday, February 4, 2011
2:30-4:00 pm
Room A 226

Andrew will be using the landmark Delgamuukw land claims case as a starting point to illustrate what we can learn by thinking simultaneously about medieval European history and the history of Canada's relationship with First Nations. In both of these histories, there is a contested relationship between memory, or oral tradition, on the one hand, and the authority of the written word on the other, that greatly affected power dynamics between different groups of people.

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Where things are in Egypt now, and how they got there

A useful summary from Juan Cole:

Mubarak’s Basij

Posted on 02/02/2011 by Juan

On Wednesday, the Mubarak regime showed its fangs, mounting a massive and violent repressive attack on the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. People worrying about Egypt becoming like Iran (scroll down) should worry about Egypt already being way too much like Iran as it is. That is, Hillary Clinton and others expressed anxiety in public about increasing militarization of the Iranian regime and use of military and paramilitaries to repress popular protests. But Egypt is far more militarized and now is using exactly the same tactics.

The outlines of Hosni Mubarak’s efforts to maintain regime stability and continuity have now become clear. In response to the mass demonstrations of the past week, he has done the following:

1. Late last week, he first tried to use the uniformed police and secret police to repress the crowds, killing perhaps 200-300 and wounding hundreds.

2. This effort failed to quell the protests, and the police were then withdrawn altogether, leaving the country defenseless before gangs of burglars and other criminal elements (some of which may have been composed of secret police or paid informers). The public dealt with this threat of lawlessness by organizing self-defense neighborhood patrols, and continued to refuse to stop demonstrating.

3. Mubarak appointed military intelligence ogre Omar Suleiman vice president. Suleiman had orchestrated the destruction of the Muslim radical movement of the 1990s, but he clearly was being groomed now as a possible successor to Mubarak and his crowd-control expertise would now be used not against al-Qaeda affiliates but against Egyptian civil society.

4. Mubarak mobilized the army to keep a semblance of order, but failed to convince the regular army officers to intervene against the protesters, with army chief of staff Sami Anan announcing late Monday that he would not order the troops to use force against the demonstrators.

5. When the protests continued Tuesday, Mubarak came on television and announced that he would not run for yet another term and would step down in September. His refusal to step down immediately and his other maneuvers indicated his determination, and probably that of a significant section of the officer corps, to maintain the military dictatorship in Egypt, but to attempt to placate the public with an offer to switch out one dictator for a new one (Omar Suleiman, likely).

6. When this pledge of transition to a new military dictator did not, predictably enough, placate the public either, Mubarak on Wednesday sent several thousand secret police and paid enforcers in civilian clothing into Tahrir Square to attack the protesters with stones, knouts, and molotov cocktails, in hopes of transforming a sympathetic peaceful crowd into a menacing violent mob. This strategy is similar to the one used in summer of 2009 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to raise the cost of protesting in the streets of Tehran, when they sent in basij (volunteer pro-regime militias). Used consistently and brutally, this show of force can raise the cost of urban protesting and gradually thin out the crowds.

Note that this step number 6 required that the army agree to remain neutral and not to actively protect the crowds. The secret police goons were allowed through army checkpoints with their staves, and some even rode through on horses and camels. Aljazeera English’s correspondent suggests that the military was willing to allow the protests to the point where Mubarak would agree to stand down, but the army wants the crowd to accept that concession and go home now.

Update: Something relevant from Daniel Davies at D-squared.