Mexican Manna to Mutual Aid
It is a daily test of imagination to link two words that start with the same letter and then coherently link the words together. So my two M words today are Mexican manna and mutual aid. I figure that with the outbreak of the Mexican swine flu, which has touched people as far away as Israel and New Zealand, Mexicans and the world need manna to get through these difficult times. Not the actual spelt bread eaten in the desert by the ancient Israelites, but good news of better times that will taste sweet like manna.
Mentioned in Exodus Chapter 16, manna was eaten by ancient Jews as they wandered in the desert. Manna had a rather sweet taste. Exodus points out that manna's taste was like wafers drizzled with honey. I almost feel like going to make some, although my culinary skills are dubious at best! In the Book of Numbers, manna came at night when the dew had evaporated. Ancient Jews were instructed to eat just the manna gathered for the day and they saved additional manna for the Sabbath. Manna might have resembled white coriander seeds in colour, it was prepared as cakes to eat, and its taste varied according to who ate it. The Qu'ran describes manna in more spiritual terms as "good things" provided as "sustenance."
Given the current swine flu in Mexico and beyond, we need manna in the spiritual sense. In soccer-mad Mexico, soccer stadiums are empty! Cafes, restaurants, bars, schools, and museums are empty. The main Mexican health chief announced today that cases of new swine flu are levelling off. Is this the manna we are waiting for? Canada had 5 new cases today and the number of infected cases has reached 34. 168 Mexicans have died from the swine flu.
What the swine flu reveals is that your problems over there are my problems here. We are so globally interconnected, but we often live in our isolated worlds. Potential pandemics remind us of our common humanity. And do they not tell us that our spiritual manna can come from mutual aid? That is, from helping each other on the planet, irrespective of our national background, culture, religion, or ideological orientation.
In 1902, a Russian anarchist named Peter Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin undermined the prevalent Darwinian attitudes of his epoch by showing that cooperation rather than competition is more fundamental to the survival of animals. Kropotkin was not merely an anarchist dabbling in biological experiments in Siberia. His work has been lauded by some biologists for pointing to the inherent strengths of cooperation in advancing positive individual qualities within some species. It has been criticized by others like Steven Jay Gould who insists that there can be no "moral shortcuts" to how it is we decide to live as societies, or to construct our political institutions. These answers must be found not in nature but within ourselves. Bottom line: We must decide whether we want to stress mutual aid, or competition in terms of how we structure our lives and social and political relationships.
There are so many different answers to what is human nature and whether humans are egoistic or altruistic. Thomas Hobbes subscribed to a dark and pessimistic view of humans in the state of nature before the era of governments: Life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Each person can potentially kill us, even the weak, particularly when we are sleeping. For Hobbes, there was a war of all against all, all the time! Rousseau saw man or woman as corrupted by institutions, private property, and government and bureaucratic structures. Before these corrupting institutions came along, the "noble savage" was peaceful, cooperative, and sociable. In the 20th century, perfectionist ideologies such as Fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevik communism rejected both liberal and conservative views of human nature to radically create "new men and women" that were sculpted like marble by their elitist charismatic leaders, the dogmatic Party, and the all-powerful state. The consequences were dark and tragic, including gulags and concentration camps that sought to kill both bodies and the spirit of people seeking to be free from tyranny and abstract ideologies.
Mutual aid is one answer to what is human nature. I cannot posit it as a Truth. And we should not accept that any guardians of Truth declare what human nature is, or what it is not. Humans are capable of great generosity and mutual aid, but also callous indifference and inhumanity towards their fellow creatures and the non-human worlds. Yet, what I can say is that in the midst of the Mexican swine flu, we need spiritual manna and more mutual aid. And the lessons are certainly applicable to the other great problems of our age from nuclear annihilation and environmental decay to poverty and unemployment. When times are dark, we might have the desire to blame our fellow creatures. Perhaps the better gamble is to increase the hope, the stories of manna salvation in the midst of years of desert wandering, and our mutual aid.
Tamir Bar-On
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Last Man to Lords
Last Man to Lords
In 1992, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a seminal book The End of History and the Last Man. It was an extension of a key piece he wrote in The National Interest in 1989. Here is a link to the latter article, "The End of History?":
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm
For Fukuyama, the context was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the end for communist states from East Germany to the Soviet Union, and the unleashing of processes of German unification. In both works, Fukuyama made this stunning hypothesis: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
In short, Fukuyama, like Marx and Hegel before him, saw 1989 as a key event in the "end of history" and universal triumph of liberalism. In this blog post, I challenge Fukuyama's Last Man thesis and show how alternative political "lords" have sought to challenge liberalism's post-Cold War triumphalism in different parts of the globe. These alternative ideological "lords" include both secular and religious ideologies: ecologism, Islamism, authoritarian regimes of various ideological hues, ultra-nationalism, neo-fascism, and Traditionalism. Liberalism is Fukuyama's "lord," as well as the lord of the liberal democratic nations of the West. While it is true that processes of globalization and political unification have adopted liberal institutional norms (World Trade Organization, European Union, United Nations, International Criminal Court, etc.), we might re-evaluate Fukuyama's claim that liberalism will sweep the planet. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone point to the difficulties in imposing a liberal model on regions of the globe without a history of democratic governance.
In fairness to Fukuyama, liberalism has become the reigning hegemonic ideology in the Western democracies. Fascism and Bolshevik communism have been definitively defeated, while ideological tension has declined in the post-World War Two era. The growth of Eurocommunist parties and Third Way Labour formulations from Italy to Britain suggested that even radical, anti-capitalist leftists eventually rejected violence and sought a gradual parliamentary avenue towards socialism. The radicalism that remains in the West revolves around the extreme right-wing political parties, which have stolen the anti-capitalist mantra from the left in the context of welfare chauvinism (i.e., welfare benefits to those that belong to "our" nation biologically and culturally). Given the grave threats to environmental health on a planetary scale, the ecological parties should be a greater political force throughout Europe. Yet, they cannot come to power in one EU country, except as part of a broader coalition like in Germany.
Moreover, it is true that dictatorships or non-democratic regimes fell in numerous countries from Chile and Argentina to apartheid South Africa. We have seen a flowering of elections around the world and well over 100 countries have substantive, representative democracy. It is also true that there is growing global homogenization in terms of a world capitalist economy with its attendant institutions from G-20 to IMF, the spread of Western lifestyles, the Internet, and even common protectionist and bailout responses to the financial crisis. In these respects, Fukuyama was correct.
Yet, history will not end in terms of its grand political struggles. The essence of politics revolves around friends and foes, argued Carl Schmitt. Liberalism, Schmitt opined, sought to abolish the friend-foe distinction through a fixation on economic or technical questions. But try as liberal societies do to banish conflict and politics, they cannot for any length of time. 9-11, radical Islamism from Iran to Algeria, a resurgent authoritarian Russia, communist China, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the success of leftists Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in Venezuela and Bolivia all point to the reality that liberalism still has foes. There are alternative political lords that radically reject the liberal, individualist, and egalitarian ethos of liberalism. Tragic genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda also undermined Fukuyama's end of history position.
For Fukuyama, as for Nietzsche before him, the "last man" was the liberal man (woman): An equal among equals with "neither striving nor aspiration." The "last man" is satisfied with peace and prosperity, as well as petty material imperatives. The "last man" does not dream to re-make the world, history, and political institutions. The "last man" kills heroic, aristocratic instincts. Is Fukuyama really just worried that we will one day all be liberals addicted to our technologies and what Marcuse called a "one-dimensional" materialist project? If this is so, then perhaps Fukuyama understands that the end of history for him is a push to re-start history for all those that fundamentally reject liberalism.
Tamir Bar-On
In 1992, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a seminal book The End of History and the Last Man. It was an extension of a key piece he wrote in The National Interest in 1989. Here is a link to the latter article, "The End of History?":
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm
For Fukuyama, the context was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the end for communist states from East Germany to the Soviet Union, and the unleashing of processes of German unification. In both works, Fukuyama made this stunning hypothesis: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
In short, Fukuyama, like Marx and Hegel before him, saw 1989 as a key event in the "end of history" and universal triumph of liberalism. In this blog post, I challenge Fukuyama's Last Man thesis and show how alternative political "lords" have sought to challenge liberalism's post-Cold War triumphalism in different parts of the globe. These alternative ideological "lords" include both secular and religious ideologies: ecologism, Islamism, authoritarian regimes of various ideological hues, ultra-nationalism, neo-fascism, and Traditionalism. Liberalism is Fukuyama's "lord," as well as the lord of the liberal democratic nations of the West. While it is true that processes of globalization and political unification have adopted liberal institutional norms (World Trade Organization, European Union, United Nations, International Criminal Court, etc.), we might re-evaluate Fukuyama's claim that liberalism will sweep the planet. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone point to the difficulties in imposing a liberal model on regions of the globe without a history of democratic governance.
In fairness to Fukuyama, liberalism has become the reigning hegemonic ideology in the Western democracies. Fascism and Bolshevik communism have been definitively defeated, while ideological tension has declined in the post-World War Two era. The growth of Eurocommunist parties and Third Way Labour formulations from Italy to Britain suggested that even radical, anti-capitalist leftists eventually rejected violence and sought a gradual parliamentary avenue towards socialism. The radicalism that remains in the West revolves around the extreme right-wing political parties, which have stolen the anti-capitalist mantra from the left in the context of welfare chauvinism (i.e., welfare benefits to those that belong to "our" nation biologically and culturally). Given the grave threats to environmental health on a planetary scale, the ecological parties should be a greater political force throughout Europe. Yet, they cannot come to power in one EU country, except as part of a broader coalition like in Germany.
Moreover, it is true that dictatorships or non-democratic regimes fell in numerous countries from Chile and Argentina to apartheid South Africa. We have seen a flowering of elections around the world and well over 100 countries have substantive, representative democracy. It is also true that there is growing global homogenization in terms of a world capitalist economy with its attendant institutions from G-20 to IMF, the spread of Western lifestyles, the Internet, and even common protectionist and bailout responses to the financial crisis. In these respects, Fukuyama was correct.
Yet, history will not end in terms of its grand political struggles. The essence of politics revolves around friends and foes, argued Carl Schmitt. Liberalism, Schmitt opined, sought to abolish the friend-foe distinction through a fixation on economic or technical questions. But try as liberal societies do to banish conflict and politics, they cannot for any length of time. 9-11, radical Islamism from Iran to Algeria, a resurgent authoritarian Russia, communist China, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the success of leftists Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in Venezuela and Bolivia all point to the reality that liberalism still has foes. There are alternative political lords that radically reject the liberal, individualist, and egalitarian ethos of liberalism. Tragic genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda also undermined Fukuyama's end of history position.
For Fukuyama, as for Nietzsche before him, the "last man" was the liberal man (woman): An equal among equals with "neither striving nor aspiration." The "last man" is satisfied with peace and prosperity, as well as petty material imperatives. The "last man" does not dream to re-make the world, history, and political institutions. The "last man" kills heroic, aristocratic instincts. Is Fukuyama really just worried that we will one day all be liberals addicted to our technologies and what Marcuse called a "one-dimensional" materialist project? If this is so, then perhaps Fukuyama understands that the end of history for him is a push to re-start history for all those that fundamentally reject liberalism.
Tamir Bar-On
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Kosovo to Kurdistan
Kosovo to Kurdistan
The roots of nationalism are very recent. Many experts of nationalism insist that the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 ushers in the era of the nation-state system and the attendant rise of nationalist sentiments. This is not to deny that, as Anthony Smith argues, nations with a common culture, heritage, language, identity, memories, territory, and often religion, have been around for thousands of years. Yet, for many years prior to the 17th century, our identities were familial, tribal, religious, or regional rather than national.
The process of creating nation-states was sometimes a painful one, as nations had to be "imagined," to use Benedict Anderson's delightful phrase. France, for example, in creating the French state and national identity had to forcefully assimilate other cultures and languages from Occitanians and Bretons to Basques and Corsicans. In certain instances, the creation of new nation-states like Turkey, out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, led to tragic consequences. The first major genocide of the 20th century saw 1.5 million Armenians slaughtered by Turkish nationalists. A dark chapter in nationalism history, which led Hitler to remark "Who remembers the Armenians?" Hitler, of course, understood that genocides, then as now, count on the shocking indifference of the international community.
The flip side of nationalism is liberation from the yoke of foreign or colonial oppression. This type of nationalism is viewed as defensive, necessary, and legitimate (although the tactics of "liberation movements" were not always legitimate and kosher!) in the struggle of nations to determine their own sovereign affairs. Algeria to Zimbabwe and many other countries went through this painful process of de-colonization from old colonial masters. In Algeria, when the civil war ended in 1962, 1.5 million Algerians had paid with their lives. Families were split by support for or rejection of French colonial rule. Yet, French President De Gaulle recognized an axiom of international politics: Rule other peoples and you pay a steep price. So De Gaulle shocked his former conservative and nationalist colleagues and granted independence to Algeria in 1962. De Gaulle was nearly killed by the ultra-nationalist OAS (Secret Army Organization) for abandoning French rule in Algeria. The 1950s and 1960s marked the era of massive de-colonization, particularly in Africa. Latin American nations had achieved independence much earlier, often in the 19th century, fired by Simon Bolivar and other nationalists.
In today's blog, I want to affirm the principle of self-determination of nations that De Gaulle clearly understood was in France's national interest. Yet, I want to point out that our criteria for determining whether a nation ought to have a state is still rather hazy. In 2008, Kosovo, a province of the former Yugoslavia, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. Serbia took the case to the International Court of Justice and declared the declaration of independence by Kosovo "illegal". Kosovo's declaration of independence has been recognized by 58 states, including the majority of EU states, Albania, Canada, the United States, Turkey, and Australia.
Russia, China, and numerous other states did not jump on the Kosovo bandwagon. They recognized that it would open up more claims for states within their own countries and around the world. The Czech President Vaclav Klaus echoed these sentiments, although the Czechs recognized Kosovo: "For me Kosovo is, above all, a precedent. We’ve opened a Pandora’s Box in Europe that could have disastrous consequences." A member of the National Assembly of the province of Quebec, Daniel Turp warned, "Recognition [of Kosovo] sets the stage for Ottawa to eventually recognize an independent Quebec." Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian negotiator, argued that if the United States and most of the European Union "have embraced the independence of Kosovo, why shouldn’t this happen with Palestine as well?" Good questions indeed! So this begs the question: Why does Kosovo declare independence and not Kurdistan?
The Kosovo precedent leads us to ask other questions: Which nations can have states and join the international community of nations represented by the United Nations? Are there double standards? Who decides? What roles can law and domestic and international politics play in these decisions?
By all objective standards, the Kurds should have had a state long before Kosovo declared its independence. Kurds are Sunni Muslims spread through four major countries: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. There are also Kurdish communities in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Lebanon. Yet, history has been harsh to the Kurds. Their best friend has been the mountains rather than the international community. When US President Wilson declared his principle of self-determination of nations in the aftermath of World War One, the Kurds were a good candidate for independence. They have a common language, culture, heritage, memories, and territory (albeit spread among different states, which are all threatened by Kurdish separatism). They are non-Arabs, yet share with most Arabs Sunni Islam. In recent years, they have tended to be rather secular in their political outlook, swimming against the tide of radical Islamism in the Muslim world.
From 1922-1924, a Kingdom of Kurdistan existed in Northern Iraq after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Since 1991, the Kurdish Regional Government has had a high degree of autonomy in Iraq, under US protection. In Turkey, the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist organization, has waged a war of independence against the Turkish state since 1984, with 30,000 dead and terrible repercussions for both Kurdish and Turkish civilians. The PKK's goal has been an independent Kurdish state in Turkey and they have used a spate of suicide bombings to advance their cause. In 1999, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured by the Turks in Kenya and he now calls for a negotiated settlement, autonomy, and Western-based individual rights for his people as opposed to suicide bombings, armed struggle, Marxism, and outright separation.
Part of the problem for Kurds is that they have been divided between different factions and states. Another problem is that they do not have great international support for a state. Kosovars, the Palestinians, and Tibetans have had far more success at publicizing their plights compared to the Kurds. The best success for the Kurds is in Iraq after two US invasions. Under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds faced a genocidal campaign that killed about 100,000 people. So they are happy to live without the Ba'athist dictator today. And the region is thriving compared to other parts of Iraq riddled by Sunni-Shi'íte violence.
Kosovo, in contrast, has been recognized by 58 countries. Its case is assisted by two very powerful global actors, the United States (which backed the terrorist KLA that today rules Kosovo) and the European Union. The European Union and the United States want to assuage Turkey, a key all in the war on terror and militant Islamism, and so they will not fully back Kurdish independence in Turkey. Realpolitik counts for a lot when we back some states for independence and not others.
Supporters of Kosovo independence say Serbia brought the situation upon itself by trampling constitutional guarantees for Kosovo autonomy. The NATO bombing against Yugoslavia in 1999 sealed the deal. NATO came to the aid of Kosovar Albanian Muslims, which it claimed were being systematically killed and ethnically cleansed by the Milosevic regime. The truth is that far more ethnic cleansing took place from 1992 to 1995 and the world watched as Sarajevo was shelled for more than three years by Serbian gunners. Serbs were also expelled en masse from their homes in the Krajina (Croatia), a fact we tend to ignore. It is estimated that 200,000 Bosnian Muslim died in the war that broke up Yugoslavia, a war Yugoslavia fought to maintain its territorial sovereignty. Yet, the lesson was the same, for Milosevic as De Gaulle, years earlier: You cannot keep people in your state against their will.
From the Serb side, they ask why must Kosovo be independent? Can they not remain autonomous within Serbia? They also argue that Kosovars are largely Muslim Albanians and there is already an Albanian state. Moreover, Kosovo is the "Jerusalem of the Serbs," as Tim Judah points out. It is the place of its great historical memories, the defeat against Turkish armies in the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, etched in Serb national consciousness. It is the site of their splendid religious monasteries. Besides, Serbs now face reverse discrimination and ethnic cleansing as the KLA took power in Kosovo and led the drive for unilateral independence.
From the aforementioned discussion, we can devise a few conclusions and questions related to the history of nationalism and its future:
1) Let people go rather than rule them.
2) Letting them go avoids bloodshed and war (although realists say it merely delays it and encourages more demands and violence).
3) There is no consistency in terms of why some nations get states and others do not. Great powers, unique circumstances, and profound state oppression can all push the drive to independence. Yet, suffering does not guarantee you a state, as arguably Kurd historical suffering has dwarfed its Kosovar counterpart and yet Kurds do not have a state and Kosovars do (almost) have one. In this respect, one wonders why the Kurds or Palestinians do not pull a Kosovo: A unilateral declaration of independence? Why did Palestinians from 1948-1967, before there were Israeli settlements and "occupation," not declare independence in the West Bank or Gaza (at the time under Jordanian and Egytpian control respectively)?
4) As corporations and regional bodies like the European Union increasingly gain power in an era of globalization and states lose sovereignty, will nationalism become a thing of the past?
5) Or, do we need more smaller nations so that great powers like the United States and China find it easier to navigate the minefield of global adventurism? Divide and rule and more states makes it easier for big powers to rule.
6) Do we really want independence for some nations?
7) Courts and international legal bodies can opine on the legality or illegality of self-determination for particular groups, but the reality is that we are radically inconsistent. In the US and Canada, hundreds of Native nations might authentically qualify for self-determination, but are denied this right. The Iroquois Confederacy had its own structures of self-governance long before European colonization. Yet, we disingenuously support the right of Kosovars or Palestinians to gain independence, but not necessarily the Kurds or Natives in Canada.
8)The reality is that peoples themselves decide whether they want to stay or go from an existing state based on subjective and objective criteria. When the Quebecois twice rejected independence in Canada in 1980 and 1995 (just barely in 1995, with 49 per cent for separation), the Quebecois that voted for independence were basing their decisions on the fact that Quebec has all the criteria for independence (common language, culture, territory, religion, and civil law tradition), as well as the subjective desire to be free of "les anglais" (English Canada, the British Crown, and the United States). The Parti Quebecois (PQ), which led the drive for independence for Quebec, often denied the right of Natives within Quebec to separate, or the right of English-Canadian minorities in Montreal to remain in Canada.
9) Prediction: Other Pandora's boxes will be opened in the future after Kosovo. The reason is that nobody can really tell me why some nations get states, while others still languish in perpetual statelessness.
10) States are becoming less important, but they serve important legitimization functions for people, leaders, and governments around the world from compensation for the loss of religious communities of belonging in the West to "anti-imperialist" posturing in Venezuela or Iran. States will survive the age of globalization as entities of legitimization, but the roles of states are rapidly shifting. Predicting the future is folly, as humans constantly re-create their histories, institutions, and forms of belonging.
Tamir Bar-On
The roots of nationalism are very recent. Many experts of nationalism insist that the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 ushers in the era of the nation-state system and the attendant rise of nationalist sentiments. This is not to deny that, as Anthony Smith argues, nations with a common culture, heritage, language, identity, memories, territory, and often religion, have been around for thousands of years. Yet, for many years prior to the 17th century, our identities were familial, tribal, religious, or regional rather than national.
The process of creating nation-states was sometimes a painful one, as nations had to be "imagined," to use Benedict Anderson's delightful phrase. France, for example, in creating the French state and national identity had to forcefully assimilate other cultures and languages from Occitanians and Bretons to Basques and Corsicans. In certain instances, the creation of new nation-states like Turkey, out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, led to tragic consequences. The first major genocide of the 20th century saw 1.5 million Armenians slaughtered by Turkish nationalists. A dark chapter in nationalism history, which led Hitler to remark "Who remembers the Armenians?" Hitler, of course, understood that genocides, then as now, count on the shocking indifference of the international community.
The flip side of nationalism is liberation from the yoke of foreign or colonial oppression. This type of nationalism is viewed as defensive, necessary, and legitimate (although the tactics of "liberation movements" were not always legitimate and kosher!) in the struggle of nations to determine their own sovereign affairs. Algeria to Zimbabwe and many other countries went through this painful process of de-colonization from old colonial masters. In Algeria, when the civil war ended in 1962, 1.5 million Algerians had paid with their lives. Families were split by support for or rejection of French colonial rule. Yet, French President De Gaulle recognized an axiom of international politics: Rule other peoples and you pay a steep price. So De Gaulle shocked his former conservative and nationalist colleagues and granted independence to Algeria in 1962. De Gaulle was nearly killed by the ultra-nationalist OAS (Secret Army Organization) for abandoning French rule in Algeria. The 1950s and 1960s marked the era of massive de-colonization, particularly in Africa. Latin American nations had achieved independence much earlier, often in the 19th century, fired by Simon Bolivar and other nationalists.
In today's blog, I want to affirm the principle of self-determination of nations that De Gaulle clearly understood was in France's national interest. Yet, I want to point out that our criteria for determining whether a nation ought to have a state is still rather hazy. In 2008, Kosovo, a province of the former Yugoslavia, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. Serbia took the case to the International Court of Justice and declared the declaration of independence by Kosovo "illegal". Kosovo's declaration of independence has been recognized by 58 states, including the majority of EU states, Albania, Canada, the United States, Turkey, and Australia.
Russia, China, and numerous other states did not jump on the Kosovo bandwagon. They recognized that it would open up more claims for states within their own countries and around the world. The Czech President Vaclav Klaus echoed these sentiments, although the Czechs recognized Kosovo: "For me Kosovo is, above all, a precedent. We’ve opened a Pandora’s Box in Europe that could have disastrous consequences." A member of the National Assembly of the province of Quebec, Daniel Turp warned, "Recognition [of Kosovo] sets the stage for Ottawa to eventually recognize an independent Quebec." Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian negotiator, argued that if the United States and most of the European Union "have embraced the independence of Kosovo, why shouldn’t this happen with Palestine as well?" Good questions indeed! So this begs the question: Why does Kosovo declare independence and not Kurdistan?
The Kosovo precedent leads us to ask other questions: Which nations can have states and join the international community of nations represented by the United Nations? Are there double standards? Who decides? What roles can law and domestic and international politics play in these decisions?
By all objective standards, the Kurds should have had a state long before Kosovo declared its independence. Kurds are Sunni Muslims spread through four major countries: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. There are also Kurdish communities in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Lebanon. Yet, history has been harsh to the Kurds. Their best friend has been the mountains rather than the international community. When US President Wilson declared his principle of self-determination of nations in the aftermath of World War One, the Kurds were a good candidate for independence. They have a common language, culture, heritage, memories, and territory (albeit spread among different states, which are all threatened by Kurdish separatism). They are non-Arabs, yet share with most Arabs Sunni Islam. In recent years, they have tended to be rather secular in their political outlook, swimming against the tide of radical Islamism in the Muslim world.
From 1922-1924, a Kingdom of Kurdistan existed in Northern Iraq after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Since 1991, the Kurdish Regional Government has had a high degree of autonomy in Iraq, under US protection. In Turkey, the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist organization, has waged a war of independence against the Turkish state since 1984, with 30,000 dead and terrible repercussions for both Kurdish and Turkish civilians. The PKK's goal has been an independent Kurdish state in Turkey and they have used a spate of suicide bombings to advance their cause. In 1999, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured by the Turks in Kenya and he now calls for a negotiated settlement, autonomy, and Western-based individual rights for his people as opposed to suicide bombings, armed struggle, Marxism, and outright separation.
Part of the problem for Kurds is that they have been divided between different factions and states. Another problem is that they do not have great international support for a state. Kosovars, the Palestinians, and Tibetans have had far more success at publicizing their plights compared to the Kurds. The best success for the Kurds is in Iraq after two US invasions. Under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds faced a genocidal campaign that killed about 100,000 people. So they are happy to live without the Ba'athist dictator today. And the region is thriving compared to other parts of Iraq riddled by Sunni-Shi'íte violence.
Kosovo, in contrast, has been recognized by 58 countries. Its case is assisted by two very powerful global actors, the United States (which backed the terrorist KLA that today rules Kosovo) and the European Union. The European Union and the United States want to assuage Turkey, a key all in the war on terror and militant Islamism, and so they will not fully back Kurdish independence in Turkey. Realpolitik counts for a lot when we back some states for independence and not others.
Supporters of Kosovo independence say Serbia brought the situation upon itself by trampling constitutional guarantees for Kosovo autonomy. The NATO bombing against Yugoslavia in 1999 sealed the deal. NATO came to the aid of Kosovar Albanian Muslims, which it claimed were being systematically killed and ethnically cleansed by the Milosevic regime. The truth is that far more ethnic cleansing took place from 1992 to 1995 and the world watched as Sarajevo was shelled for more than three years by Serbian gunners. Serbs were also expelled en masse from their homes in the Krajina (Croatia), a fact we tend to ignore. It is estimated that 200,000 Bosnian Muslim died in the war that broke up Yugoslavia, a war Yugoslavia fought to maintain its territorial sovereignty. Yet, the lesson was the same, for Milosevic as De Gaulle, years earlier: You cannot keep people in your state against their will.
From the Serb side, they ask why must Kosovo be independent? Can they not remain autonomous within Serbia? They also argue that Kosovars are largely Muslim Albanians and there is already an Albanian state. Moreover, Kosovo is the "Jerusalem of the Serbs," as Tim Judah points out. It is the place of its great historical memories, the defeat against Turkish armies in the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, etched in Serb national consciousness. It is the site of their splendid religious monasteries. Besides, Serbs now face reverse discrimination and ethnic cleansing as the KLA took power in Kosovo and led the drive for unilateral independence.
From the aforementioned discussion, we can devise a few conclusions and questions related to the history of nationalism and its future:
1) Let people go rather than rule them.
2) Letting them go avoids bloodshed and war (although realists say it merely delays it and encourages more demands and violence).
3) There is no consistency in terms of why some nations get states and others do not. Great powers, unique circumstances, and profound state oppression can all push the drive to independence. Yet, suffering does not guarantee you a state, as arguably Kurd historical suffering has dwarfed its Kosovar counterpart and yet Kurds do not have a state and Kosovars do (almost) have one. In this respect, one wonders why the Kurds or Palestinians do not pull a Kosovo: A unilateral declaration of independence? Why did Palestinians from 1948-1967, before there were Israeli settlements and "occupation," not declare independence in the West Bank or Gaza (at the time under Jordanian and Egytpian control respectively)?
4) As corporations and regional bodies like the European Union increasingly gain power in an era of globalization and states lose sovereignty, will nationalism become a thing of the past?
5) Or, do we need more smaller nations so that great powers like the United States and China find it easier to navigate the minefield of global adventurism? Divide and rule and more states makes it easier for big powers to rule.
6) Do we really want independence for some nations?
7) Courts and international legal bodies can opine on the legality or illegality of self-determination for particular groups, but the reality is that we are radically inconsistent. In the US and Canada, hundreds of Native nations might authentically qualify for self-determination, but are denied this right. The Iroquois Confederacy had its own structures of self-governance long before European colonization. Yet, we disingenuously support the right of Kosovars or Palestinians to gain independence, but not necessarily the Kurds or Natives in Canada.
8)The reality is that peoples themselves decide whether they want to stay or go from an existing state based on subjective and objective criteria. When the Quebecois twice rejected independence in Canada in 1980 and 1995 (just barely in 1995, with 49 per cent for separation), the Quebecois that voted for independence were basing their decisions on the fact that Quebec has all the criteria for independence (common language, culture, territory, religion, and civil law tradition), as well as the subjective desire to be free of "les anglais" (English Canada, the British Crown, and the United States). The Parti Quebecois (PQ), which led the drive for independence for Quebec, often denied the right of Natives within Quebec to separate, or the right of English-Canadian minorities in Montreal to remain in Canada.
9) Prediction: Other Pandora's boxes will be opened in the future after Kosovo. The reason is that nobody can really tell me why some nations get states, while others still languish in perpetual statelessness.
10) States are becoming less important, but they serve important legitimization functions for people, leaders, and governments around the world from compensation for the loss of religious communities of belonging in the West to "anti-imperialist" posturing in Venezuela or Iran. States will survive the age of globalization as entities of legitimization, but the roles of states are rapidly shifting. Predicting the future is folly, as humans constantly re-create their histories, institutions, and forms of belonging.
Tamir Bar-On
Monday, April 27, 2009
Jerusalem of Gold to Jamaica
Jerusalem of Gold to Jamaica
Today's post has a musical angle. I will take you from Jerusalem to Jamaica on a musical tour. But the music I will talk about has deep spiritual and political resonance for people longing to be who they are; for people seeking to escape the bondage of oppression both yesterday and today.
"Jerusalem of Gold" is a song written by Naomi Shemer. It was written in 1967, the year I was born and the year of the Six-Day War. It is a haunting melody that speaks of the longing of Jews for their Jerusalem of Gold. This Jerusalem of Jewish religious longing, the Old City, was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Jewish religious sites were desecrated and Jews were barred from the Old City and the Western Wall .
Or, so we thought that "Jerusalem of Gold" was written by Naomi Shemer. Just after Shemer died, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Shemer stole the "Jerusalem of Gold" melody from a Basque troubadour Paco Ibanez. When hearing of the news, Ibanez was forgiving and magnanimous. He said he was honoured that Shemer played his melody, which actually comes from a 19th century Basque lullaby. Ibanez was a man with a "heart of gold," to use the words of Canadian folk icon Neil Young.
To get a feel for this classical Israeli folk song, below here are the translated lyrics of "Jerusalem of Gold" by Naomi Shemer:
The mountain air is clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight
With the sound of bells.
And in the slumber of tree and stone
Captured in her dream
The city that sits solitary
And in its midst is a wall.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
How the cisterns have dried
The market-place is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
But as I come to sing to you today,
And to adorn crowns to you (i.e. to tell your praise)
I am the smallest of the youngest of your children (i.e. the least worthy of doing so)
And of the last poet (i.e. of all the poets born).
For your name scorches the lips
Like the kiss of a seraph
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Which is all gold...
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the market-place
A ram's horn (shofar) calls out (i.e. is being heard) on the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine -
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho!
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
To hear the song performed by Shemer see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JZT5fKD9bM
You must be wondering now how I will connect Shemer's tune "Jerusalem of Gold" with Jamaica. Well, Jamaica has produced a musical prophet for all times, Robert Marley (1945-1981). Marley longed for a Jerusalem for his own people in Jamaica, Africa, and around the world. His songs "Exodus," "Redemption," and "Iron Lion Zion" have conspicuous biblical overtones, while "War" is based on a Haile Selassie speech to the United Nations condemning racial hatred and colonialism. His one love message, universal peace, and multiracialism have inspired legions of supporters around the globe. Marley was a Rastafari, whose culture played a substantive role in the creation of reggae music. The Rastafari movement sought to overcome the oppression of blacks in Jamaica and Africa in the age of colonialism and after. Some critics have wondered why Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian autocrat and monarch, is so venerated by Rastafarians. How can a dictator fight oppression when he is a symbol of historical oppression? His supporters reply that Selassie fought white colonialist racism and sought to imbue blacks with a necessary sense of pride, self-sufficiency, and national sovereignty.
From Israel to Jamaica and worlds beyond, music speaks to the deep spiritual and political longings of people. Sometimes it speaks to people of particular cultures, but mostly to cultures around the world and the yearning of nations, cultures, and individuals to be more free. In this sense, both "Jerusalem of Gold" and "Exodus" from two different musical traditions speak of the universal hope in our hearts for a freer, more just world.
Tamir Bar-On
Today's post has a musical angle. I will take you from Jerusalem to Jamaica on a musical tour. But the music I will talk about has deep spiritual and political resonance for people longing to be who they are; for people seeking to escape the bondage of oppression both yesterday and today.
"Jerusalem of Gold" is a song written by Naomi Shemer. It was written in 1967, the year I was born and the year of the Six-Day War. It is a haunting melody that speaks of the longing of Jews for their Jerusalem of Gold. This Jerusalem of Jewish religious longing, the Old City, was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Jewish religious sites were desecrated and Jews were barred from the Old City and the Western Wall .
Or, so we thought that "Jerusalem of Gold" was written by Naomi Shemer. Just after Shemer died, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Shemer stole the "Jerusalem of Gold" melody from a Basque troubadour Paco Ibanez. When hearing of the news, Ibanez was forgiving and magnanimous. He said he was honoured that Shemer played his melody, which actually comes from a 19th century Basque lullaby. Ibanez was a man with a "heart of gold," to use the words of Canadian folk icon Neil Young.
To get a feel for this classical Israeli folk song, below here are the translated lyrics of "Jerusalem of Gold" by Naomi Shemer:
The mountain air is clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight
With the sound of bells.
And in the slumber of tree and stone
Captured in her dream
The city that sits solitary
And in its midst is a wall.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
How the cisterns have dried
The market-place is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
But as I come to sing to you today,
And to adorn crowns to you (i.e. to tell your praise)
I am the smallest of the youngest of your children (i.e. the least worthy of doing so)
And of the last poet (i.e. of all the poets born).
For your name scorches the lips
Like the kiss of a seraph
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Which is all gold...
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the market-place
A ram's horn (shofar) calls out (i.e. is being heard) on the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine -
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho!
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
To hear the song performed by Shemer see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JZT5fKD9bM
You must be wondering now how I will connect Shemer's tune "Jerusalem of Gold" with Jamaica. Well, Jamaica has produced a musical prophet for all times, Robert Marley (1945-1981). Marley longed for a Jerusalem for his own people in Jamaica, Africa, and around the world. His songs "Exodus," "Redemption," and "Iron Lion Zion" have conspicuous biblical overtones, while "War" is based on a Haile Selassie speech to the United Nations condemning racial hatred and colonialism. His one love message, universal peace, and multiracialism have inspired legions of supporters around the globe. Marley was a Rastafari, whose culture played a substantive role in the creation of reggae music. The Rastafari movement sought to overcome the oppression of blacks in Jamaica and Africa in the age of colonialism and after. Some critics have wondered why Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian autocrat and monarch, is so venerated by Rastafarians. How can a dictator fight oppression when he is a symbol of historical oppression? His supporters reply that Selassie fought white colonialist racism and sought to imbue blacks with a necessary sense of pride, self-sufficiency, and national sovereignty.
From Israel to Jamaica and worlds beyond, music speaks to the deep spiritual and political longings of people. Sometimes it speaks to people of particular cultures, but mostly to cultures around the world and the yearning of nations, cultures, and individuals to be more free. In this sense, both "Jerusalem of Gold" and "Exodus" from two different musical traditions speak of the universal hope in our hearts for a freer, more just world.
Tamir Bar-On
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Israel to Icke
Israel to Icke
Israel and Jews are in the news a lot. Anti-Semitism, or the "socialism of fools," frequently drives this obsession with Jews, merely 13 million people on the planet. It is a worldwide illness with no cure. And increasingly Israel and Jews are subject to conspiracy theories, including one of the most popular proposed by the former British footballer and writer David Icke (b. 1952). In And The Truth Shall Set You Free, Icke argued that a secret Global Elite rules the world. In addition, he insists that Hitler and the Holocaust were supported by prominent Jewish banking families. At other times, Icke argues that the Global Elite, which caused all the world's great revolutions and wars, as well as 9-11, consists of a cabal of Jews and non-Jews. His works have been praised by Christian patriots, ultra-nationalists, and militia movements in the United States, which insist that the United States is a "Zionist Occupation Government" run by Israel. In 1999, at the request of the Canadian Jewish Congress, his books were removed from Indigo stores. In that same year, he spoke for four hours at the University of Toronto and received a standing ovation.
In today's blog, I want to offer an Israel-Canadian perspective on Israel. Icke and other conspiracy theorists increasingly gain popular support in a post-9-11 climate. The National Post's Jonathan Kay reported today that in one poll 39 per cent of Canadians think 9-11 was an "inside job." That is, 9-11 was not an al-Qaeda operation, but conducted by elite neo-conservatives within the US government, powerful Jews, the Mossad, Israel, the Illuminati, or a Global Elite to advance US geopolitical and economic goals. These conspiracies are a reaction to increasing global cynicism vis-a-vis democratic institutions, the mainstream media, and the corruption of politicians of all ideological stripes. That the conspiracy theories sometimes target Jews is no surprise, given the history of global anti-Semitism and the worldwide, popular circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Egypt to Russia.
In Canada, the Jewish community is divided on Israel, although the vast majority support Israel's right to exist, Zionism's goal of Jewish self-determination, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts. Yet, there is also a strong anti-Zionist Jewish intelligentsia in Canada, which subtly revives conspiracy theories related to Israel's disproportionate impact on regional and global affairs. These left-wing Jews are not like the aforementioned Icke (after all, they do not trumpet the Icke position that the Global Elite consists of shape-shifting reptiles!), but they analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a simplistic manner that ignores the impact of numerous players such as the Palestinians, Arab and Muslim states, the United States, the European Union, and Israel.
In the March 19-25 issue of Toronto left-wing weekly Now, 161 Jewish Canadians published a manifesto entitled “Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of Israel.” The signatories included numerous academics, anti-globalization guru Naomi Klein, peace activist Ursula Franklin, and renowned pianist Anton Kuerti.
The manifesto is mind-boggling for its distasteful one-sidedness and naïve inability to see increasing genocidal, realpolitik threats to Jews and Israel from radical Islamism and assorted secular foes. Moreover, the tone of the manifesto is manipulative moralizing in respect of silencing of criticism of Israel. As a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, I express my deepest concern “About Jewish Canadians Concerned” in a two-fold manner. I first flesh out the main contents of the manifesto. Second, I comprehensively critique the manifesto. I offer an antidote to a neo-Marxist manifesto that sees all of political reality in simplistic terms: Israel the evil bourgeoisie and Palestinians the saintly, oppressed proletariat marching to victory.
The opening line of the manifesto states: “We are Jewish Canadians concerned about all expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, and social injustice.” These are indeed noble yet disingenuous sentiments. Where was a manifesto when genocidal, Iranian-backed anti-Semites bombed the Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 killing 85? Or, when Hamas and Fatah suicide bombers repeatedly killed Israelis of all faiths, but really hoped to kill as many Jews as possible? Or, when our Jewish students at York, Concordia, and Laurier no longer feel safe on campuses because the collective Jew (the state of Israel) is the most vilified, allegedly “apartheid” state in the world? Where were your voices when Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, but received the gifts of thousands of rockets from annihilationist Hezbollah and Hamas seeking to cleanse the planet of Jews? Or, when police officers vandalize synagogues in Venezuela or French Jews are beaten and killed merely because they are Jews?
I know your responses. I anticipate them in advance. Israel’s “crimes” against the Palestinians cause anti-Semitism to climb. Before 1948 Jews had no state and lots of enemies. Do you not remember Pale of Settlement, massacres of Jews in Hebron in 1929, or the ghettoes under both Christian and Muslim rulers? And after 1948 with a state Jews have lots of enemies, including the vast majority of the Muslim Arab world that sees all of Israel as usurped Muslim land, traditional anti-Semites on the right, and “progressives” that hide behind the rhetorical fog of anti-Zionism to deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination and statehood.
Let’s move to the second line: “We believe that the Holocaust legacy ‘Never again’ means never again for all peoples.” The reality is very different. Genocide scholars understand the systematic, unique nature of the Holocaust. Its lethal combination of traditional anti-Semitism, scientific racism, distancing mechanisms (race laws, ghettoes, removal of Jews from professional life, denial of legal and citizenship rights, etc.), and cold-blooded, technological bureaucratization of state killing was unique in human history. The nearly 6 million Jewish dead is a lesson for the world of humanity’s inhumanity. Yet, the reality is that genocides all proceed in the fog of war and due to the indifference of the international community. The language of “genocidal Israel” coming out of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), which the signatories support, is both inaccurate and an affront to the victims of real genocides from Jews and Armenians to Tutsis and Darfuris. Israel, like any state sometimes lacks proportionality, but its intent is not genocidal vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Jews were not armed and were without a state during the Holocaust, while Palestinians, Arabs from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran are armed and openly express their genocidal intentions in respect of Jews and Israel.
The third line of the manifesto: “It is a tragic turn of history that the State of Israel, with its ideals of democracy and its dream of being a safe haven for the Jewish people, causes immeasurable suffering and injustice to the Palestinians.” First, better to have ideals of democracy and fall a little short than have no democratic dreams and languish in state authoritarianism like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the entire Arab world. Second, Israel sometimes causes harm to the Palestinians by unwittingly killing civilians as a by-product of military or counter-terrorist operations. Israel is allowed to respond to threats to its citizens like any self-respecting state. Third, Israel alone has not been the sole cause of the Palestinian drama. Israel, Palestinians, Arab states, the Muslim world, and great powers have all played their role in perpetuating an addictive conflict. This story is not told by the signatories because it is too complicated and pierces the veil of Israel as absolute oppressor and Palestinians eternal victims.
The manifesto argues that “prominent Jewish organizations and leading Canadian politicians” have sought to “silence protest against the state of Israel.” The signatories are alarmed by “fear tactics” akin to the anti-communist, McCarthyism of the 1950s in which IAW activists are accused of anti-Semitism to “deflect from Israel’s flagrant violations of international humanitarian law.”
B’nai Brith was correct to call IAW an anti-Israel “hate-festival,” but inconsistent with liberal democratic values when it sought to ban IAW. At all 13 IAW participating cities in Canada, there was not one pro-Zionist speaker. In comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa the insinuation was that demonic Israel should be liquidated. Jews as a collective cannot be allowed to exist. No speakers even called for a two-state solution to the conflict. Is this what passes for debate on university campuses?
It is true that there is silencing, but the silencing of pro-Israel positions on university campuses that rush to embrace the Palestinian cause as the human rights struggle of our age. The fear that the signatories speak about are not of my Jewish students. During IAW they were afraid to express their pro-Israel positions, even if they support the creation of a Palestinian state. The hostile campus atmosphere against Jews led PM Stephen Harper and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to speak out against anti-Semitism on campuses. When Israel is completely demonized without any redeeming features, as was the case during IAW, then real attacks on Jews will follow.
And political authorities silencing protest against Israel? Last time I checked Haroon Siddiqui still wrote his incomprehensible anti-Israel ramblings in the Toronto Star. IAW took place once again with the support of university administrators and professors across Canada. Now published its manifesto. Even the pro-Israel National Post opened its pages to IAW supporters Judy Rebick and Alan Sears. If this is silencing of criticism of Israel, then I ask the signatories to travel to China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, and Russia to see what real press silencing looks like with the assistance of the barrel of the gun.
In addition, the signatories fail to see any anti-Semitism in the disproportionate criticism of Israel at IAW, its singling out on the international stage at the UN and Durban, and the anti-Zionism that once succeeded in calling Israel a “racist” state in 1975. There are older and newer guises of anti-Semitism. The newer ones code their anti-Semitism: “anti-Zionism,” “one-state solution,” “genocidal Israel,” “prominent Jewish lobbies,” and the like. If as a national collective Jews are denied the right to statehood, unlike any other nation in the world, then I am prepared to say that anti-Semitism is a motivating factor. Remember I also support the creation of a viable Palestinian state, as long as it lives in peace with Israel. I am not so sure what the signatories support, but they would make their case more clear if they offered constructive solutions rather than absolute demonisation of Israel without any historical context.
Finally, the spurious claim is made that IAW call for boycotts of Israel is not anti-Semitic. Boycotts against Israeli academics, many who are critical of the state of Israel, has the whiff of boycotts of Jews in inter-war Europe and Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism, the signatories insist, masks Israeli international law violations. It is true that boycotts per se do not have to be anti-Semitic, but then why no similar boycott of “apartheid Canada” for its reservation system vis-à-vis Natives? Or, Russia for the 100,000 dead in the Chechen wars. Or, the Turks for their cruel treatment of the Kurds? Or, Sudan, who’s leader al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” for killing 300,000 in Darfur and sending another 2.5 million into exile?
On the international law issue, Israel has been accused of so many gross violations of international law and “massacres” like the fiction of Jenin that we surely cannot rely on the UN for a modicum of balance. No state is so denigrated by the international community as Israel. In terms of the Gaza operation, Israel had a legitimate right to respond after thousands of rockets fired into southern Israel. Such a declaration of war allows a state to respond. One can dispute the proportionality of the response. International media outlets and human rights organizations repeat Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorous, although it is only illegal in civilian areas. They repeat it because they know that Israel followed the international law principle of “military necessity” against a foe that hides behind civilians. Where were the petitions for the residents of Sderot or Kiryat Shmona for stoically suffering years of rocket fire? Were these not violations of international law? In fact, a case can be made that they are more so violations of international law because the shells are fired indiscriminately into civilian areas without any military necessity.
I happen to be against the Israeli presence in the West Bank and the building of more settlements, but I am not so naïve as to think that Israel’s withdrawl will usher in an era of peace. Educated and uneducated Palestinians and Muslims in general continue to see Israel as a “foreign body” in the region. Textbooks and mainstream media in the Arab world, as well as Muslim regimes, continue to repeat Holocaust hoax theories. Demonisation of Jews as individuals and as collective (Israel) are standard, while the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is spuriously repeated as a plot devised by Jews to rule the world. These fictions flourish in authoritarian political climates precisely because people have ceded political power to Arab monarchs, secular autocrats, or Islamist theocrats. In short, they have no real power over the political process, unlike democratic Israel, and hence blame Jews for all their ills. Similar anti-Semitic conspiracies flourish in Eastern Europe, which lived under the totalitarian tutelage of the Soviet Union.
The signatories claim that Jewish organizations “pressured university presidents and administrators to silence debate and discussion regarding Israel/Palestine.” B’nai Brith has every right to withhold funds from universities for supporting IAW. Would the Canadian Arab Federation open its wallets to universities if they promoted Arab or Muslim “apartheid” weeks? Moreover, the insinuation here is that the Jewish organizations have great pull, but the reality is that they were impotent to stop IAW.
It is true that some free speech was undermined, which I cannot support because it contravenes the ethic of a liberal democracy. Yet, this was a negligible denigration of speech such as the banning of an IAW poster at Carleton University. Do we forget that these same IAW supporters prevented current Israeli PM Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University in 2003 by violently rioting? And do we forget that university administrators shamefully capitulated to the doctrinaire ideologues?
Near the end of the petition, the authors state: “We do not believe that Israel acts in self-defense.” Israel, they argue, is the largest recipient of US aid at $3 million per day. It also has “the fourth strongest army in the world.” The last claim cannot be corroborated because how do we test the “strongest army in the world”? Is it technological sophistication, manpower, training readiness, or esprit de corps? In terms of manpower, Israel cannot be the fourth strongest army because the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, Britain, and France all have larger armies than Israel.
From a realist perspective, all states in an anarchical international system seek to augment their power, will use violence to do so, and will seek to get an upper hand on their regional foes. Israel is no different from other states, yet it is treated like the pariah among world states. Furthermore, if we follow the realist logic, states sometimes have to act offensively to avert greater catastrophes (i.e., state survival) or to aggrandize their power. In its history Israel has acted defensively in 1948 and offensively as in the Six-Day War in 1967 because they feared an imminent attack by Arab armies. When Israel struck the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981, it acted offensively yet in a defensive capacity against a Ba’athist regime that openly threatened its existence. The theocratic, genocidal Iranian regime today presents Israel with similar difficulties should it acquire nuclear weapons. Finally, if Israel acted offensively in Lebanon (1982 and 2006) and Gaza in 2008-9 the operations were also defensive counter-reactions to non-state terrorist groups that seek its destruction and threaten the security of its citizens.
The petition ends with an unintended ironic note. The signatories twice reject “specious claims of anti-Semitism” and “false charges of anti-Semitism” for those that criticize Israel. Why so much barking about anti-Semitism by the signatories? Could it be that they bark too much because they have the most to hide? They call for freedom of speech and “legitimate criticism of Israel.” The problem is that the IAW “progressives” do not engage in “legitimate criticism of Israel.” Israel is singled out among the community of nations, allusions to unsubstantiated Jewish power are made, and IAW calls for a “one-state solution” that would in effect lead to the liquidation of Jewish and democratic Israel.
The sad reality is that there is a more reasoned examination of Israeli “apartheid” at Israeli universities or Ha’aretz than the petition in question or IAW debates on Canadian campuses. This speaks to the poverty of authentic political debate in Canada, the sloganeering moral righteousness, and the desire for partisanship rather than genuine solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy.
In conclusion, the silent majority of Canadian Jews would probably express the gravest concern about “Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of Israel.” The manifesto highlights the psychological delusions of left-wing “progressives” that follow fads with the hope that they will one day be saved by their tormentors. The manifesto comes at a time when the worldwide demonisation of Israel has reached fever pitch. Criticism of Israel has become the Che Guevara chic of recent years. It is good for academic careers. How can there be suppression of criticism of Israel when criticism of the state has become fashionable? The chorus of anti-Zionists runs the gamut from Islamist theocrats to European left-wingers, and conspiracy theorists of the Icke mould to North American neo-Marxist secularists. And anti-Semites of a traditional hue. Icke disingenuously denies that he fits the anti-Semitic category, despite his position that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a political truth. The downplaying of any anti-Semitic motives by the signatories is both farcical and tragic. What the signatories fail to realize is that Israel’s foes are coming for the Jews and democracy. There will be no distinction between good Jew and bad Jew. If Israel fails, not one of us will remain.
Tamir Bar-On
Israel and Jews are in the news a lot. Anti-Semitism, or the "socialism of fools," frequently drives this obsession with Jews, merely 13 million people on the planet. It is a worldwide illness with no cure. And increasingly Israel and Jews are subject to conspiracy theories, including one of the most popular proposed by the former British footballer and writer David Icke (b. 1952). In And The Truth Shall Set You Free, Icke argued that a secret Global Elite rules the world. In addition, he insists that Hitler and the Holocaust were supported by prominent Jewish banking families. At other times, Icke argues that the Global Elite, which caused all the world's great revolutions and wars, as well as 9-11, consists of a cabal of Jews and non-Jews. His works have been praised by Christian patriots, ultra-nationalists, and militia movements in the United States, which insist that the United States is a "Zionist Occupation Government" run by Israel. In 1999, at the request of the Canadian Jewish Congress, his books were removed from Indigo stores. In that same year, he spoke for four hours at the University of Toronto and received a standing ovation.
In today's blog, I want to offer an Israel-Canadian perspective on Israel. Icke and other conspiracy theorists increasingly gain popular support in a post-9-11 climate. The National Post's Jonathan Kay reported today that in one poll 39 per cent of Canadians think 9-11 was an "inside job." That is, 9-11 was not an al-Qaeda operation, but conducted by elite neo-conservatives within the US government, powerful Jews, the Mossad, Israel, the Illuminati, or a Global Elite to advance US geopolitical and economic goals. These conspiracies are a reaction to increasing global cynicism vis-a-vis democratic institutions, the mainstream media, and the corruption of politicians of all ideological stripes. That the conspiracy theories sometimes target Jews is no surprise, given the history of global anti-Semitism and the worldwide, popular circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Egypt to Russia.
In Canada, the Jewish community is divided on Israel, although the vast majority support Israel's right to exist, Zionism's goal of Jewish self-determination, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts. Yet, there is also a strong anti-Zionist Jewish intelligentsia in Canada, which subtly revives conspiracy theories related to Israel's disproportionate impact on regional and global affairs. These left-wing Jews are not like the aforementioned Icke (after all, they do not trumpet the Icke position that the Global Elite consists of shape-shifting reptiles!), but they analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a simplistic manner that ignores the impact of numerous players such as the Palestinians, Arab and Muslim states, the United States, the European Union, and Israel.
In the March 19-25 issue of Toronto left-wing weekly Now, 161 Jewish Canadians published a manifesto entitled “Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of Israel.” The signatories included numerous academics, anti-globalization guru Naomi Klein, peace activist Ursula Franklin, and renowned pianist Anton Kuerti.
The manifesto is mind-boggling for its distasteful one-sidedness and naïve inability to see increasing genocidal, realpolitik threats to Jews and Israel from radical Islamism and assorted secular foes. Moreover, the tone of the manifesto is manipulative moralizing in respect of silencing of criticism of Israel. As a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, I express my deepest concern “About Jewish Canadians Concerned” in a two-fold manner. I first flesh out the main contents of the manifesto. Second, I comprehensively critique the manifesto. I offer an antidote to a neo-Marxist manifesto that sees all of political reality in simplistic terms: Israel the evil bourgeoisie and Palestinians the saintly, oppressed proletariat marching to victory.
The opening line of the manifesto states: “We are Jewish Canadians concerned about all expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, and social injustice.” These are indeed noble yet disingenuous sentiments. Where was a manifesto when genocidal, Iranian-backed anti-Semites bombed the Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 killing 85? Or, when Hamas and Fatah suicide bombers repeatedly killed Israelis of all faiths, but really hoped to kill as many Jews as possible? Or, when our Jewish students at York, Concordia, and Laurier no longer feel safe on campuses because the collective Jew (the state of Israel) is the most vilified, allegedly “apartheid” state in the world? Where were your voices when Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, but received the gifts of thousands of rockets from annihilationist Hezbollah and Hamas seeking to cleanse the planet of Jews? Or, when police officers vandalize synagogues in Venezuela or French Jews are beaten and killed merely because they are Jews?
I know your responses. I anticipate them in advance. Israel’s “crimes” against the Palestinians cause anti-Semitism to climb. Before 1948 Jews had no state and lots of enemies. Do you not remember Pale of Settlement, massacres of Jews in Hebron in 1929, or the ghettoes under both Christian and Muslim rulers? And after 1948 with a state Jews have lots of enemies, including the vast majority of the Muslim Arab world that sees all of Israel as usurped Muslim land, traditional anti-Semites on the right, and “progressives” that hide behind the rhetorical fog of anti-Zionism to deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination and statehood.
Let’s move to the second line: “We believe that the Holocaust legacy ‘Never again’ means never again for all peoples.” The reality is very different. Genocide scholars understand the systematic, unique nature of the Holocaust. Its lethal combination of traditional anti-Semitism, scientific racism, distancing mechanisms (race laws, ghettoes, removal of Jews from professional life, denial of legal and citizenship rights, etc.), and cold-blooded, technological bureaucratization of state killing was unique in human history. The nearly 6 million Jewish dead is a lesson for the world of humanity’s inhumanity. Yet, the reality is that genocides all proceed in the fog of war and due to the indifference of the international community. The language of “genocidal Israel” coming out of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), which the signatories support, is both inaccurate and an affront to the victims of real genocides from Jews and Armenians to Tutsis and Darfuris. Israel, like any state sometimes lacks proportionality, but its intent is not genocidal vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Jews were not armed and were without a state during the Holocaust, while Palestinians, Arabs from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran are armed and openly express their genocidal intentions in respect of Jews and Israel.
The third line of the manifesto: “It is a tragic turn of history that the State of Israel, with its ideals of democracy and its dream of being a safe haven for the Jewish people, causes immeasurable suffering and injustice to the Palestinians.” First, better to have ideals of democracy and fall a little short than have no democratic dreams and languish in state authoritarianism like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the entire Arab world. Second, Israel sometimes causes harm to the Palestinians by unwittingly killing civilians as a by-product of military or counter-terrorist operations. Israel is allowed to respond to threats to its citizens like any self-respecting state. Third, Israel alone has not been the sole cause of the Palestinian drama. Israel, Palestinians, Arab states, the Muslim world, and great powers have all played their role in perpetuating an addictive conflict. This story is not told by the signatories because it is too complicated and pierces the veil of Israel as absolute oppressor and Palestinians eternal victims.
The manifesto argues that “prominent Jewish organizations and leading Canadian politicians” have sought to “silence protest against the state of Israel.” The signatories are alarmed by “fear tactics” akin to the anti-communist, McCarthyism of the 1950s in which IAW activists are accused of anti-Semitism to “deflect from Israel’s flagrant violations of international humanitarian law.”
B’nai Brith was correct to call IAW an anti-Israel “hate-festival,” but inconsistent with liberal democratic values when it sought to ban IAW. At all 13 IAW participating cities in Canada, there was not one pro-Zionist speaker. In comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa the insinuation was that demonic Israel should be liquidated. Jews as a collective cannot be allowed to exist. No speakers even called for a two-state solution to the conflict. Is this what passes for debate on university campuses?
It is true that there is silencing, but the silencing of pro-Israel positions on university campuses that rush to embrace the Palestinian cause as the human rights struggle of our age. The fear that the signatories speak about are not of my Jewish students. During IAW they were afraid to express their pro-Israel positions, even if they support the creation of a Palestinian state. The hostile campus atmosphere against Jews led PM Stephen Harper and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to speak out against anti-Semitism on campuses. When Israel is completely demonized without any redeeming features, as was the case during IAW, then real attacks on Jews will follow.
And political authorities silencing protest against Israel? Last time I checked Haroon Siddiqui still wrote his incomprehensible anti-Israel ramblings in the Toronto Star. IAW took place once again with the support of university administrators and professors across Canada. Now published its manifesto. Even the pro-Israel National Post opened its pages to IAW supporters Judy Rebick and Alan Sears. If this is silencing of criticism of Israel, then I ask the signatories to travel to China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, and Russia to see what real press silencing looks like with the assistance of the barrel of the gun.
In addition, the signatories fail to see any anti-Semitism in the disproportionate criticism of Israel at IAW, its singling out on the international stage at the UN and Durban, and the anti-Zionism that once succeeded in calling Israel a “racist” state in 1975. There are older and newer guises of anti-Semitism. The newer ones code their anti-Semitism: “anti-Zionism,” “one-state solution,” “genocidal Israel,” “prominent Jewish lobbies,” and the like. If as a national collective Jews are denied the right to statehood, unlike any other nation in the world, then I am prepared to say that anti-Semitism is a motivating factor. Remember I also support the creation of a viable Palestinian state, as long as it lives in peace with Israel. I am not so sure what the signatories support, but they would make their case more clear if they offered constructive solutions rather than absolute demonisation of Israel without any historical context.
Finally, the spurious claim is made that IAW call for boycotts of Israel is not anti-Semitic. Boycotts against Israeli academics, many who are critical of the state of Israel, has the whiff of boycotts of Jews in inter-war Europe and Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism, the signatories insist, masks Israeli international law violations. It is true that boycotts per se do not have to be anti-Semitic, but then why no similar boycott of “apartheid Canada” for its reservation system vis-à-vis Natives? Or, Russia for the 100,000 dead in the Chechen wars. Or, the Turks for their cruel treatment of the Kurds? Or, Sudan, who’s leader al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” for killing 300,000 in Darfur and sending another 2.5 million into exile?
On the international law issue, Israel has been accused of so many gross violations of international law and “massacres” like the fiction of Jenin that we surely cannot rely on the UN for a modicum of balance. No state is so denigrated by the international community as Israel. In terms of the Gaza operation, Israel had a legitimate right to respond after thousands of rockets fired into southern Israel. Such a declaration of war allows a state to respond. One can dispute the proportionality of the response. International media outlets and human rights organizations repeat Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorous, although it is only illegal in civilian areas. They repeat it because they know that Israel followed the international law principle of “military necessity” against a foe that hides behind civilians. Where were the petitions for the residents of Sderot or Kiryat Shmona for stoically suffering years of rocket fire? Were these not violations of international law? In fact, a case can be made that they are more so violations of international law because the shells are fired indiscriminately into civilian areas without any military necessity.
I happen to be against the Israeli presence in the West Bank and the building of more settlements, but I am not so naïve as to think that Israel’s withdrawl will usher in an era of peace. Educated and uneducated Palestinians and Muslims in general continue to see Israel as a “foreign body” in the region. Textbooks and mainstream media in the Arab world, as well as Muslim regimes, continue to repeat Holocaust hoax theories. Demonisation of Jews as individuals and as collective (Israel) are standard, while the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is spuriously repeated as a plot devised by Jews to rule the world. These fictions flourish in authoritarian political climates precisely because people have ceded political power to Arab monarchs, secular autocrats, or Islamist theocrats. In short, they have no real power over the political process, unlike democratic Israel, and hence blame Jews for all their ills. Similar anti-Semitic conspiracies flourish in Eastern Europe, which lived under the totalitarian tutelage of the Soviet Union.
The signatories claim that Jewish organizations “pressured university presidents and administrators to silence debate and discussion regarding Israel/Palestine.” B’nai Brith has every right to withhold funds from universities for supporting IAW. Would the Canadian Arab Federation open its wallets to universities if they promoted Arab or Muslim “apartheid” weeks? Moreover, the insinuation here is that the Jewish organizations have great pull, but the reality is that they were impotent to stop IAW.
It is true that some free speech was undermined, which I cannot support because it contravenes the ethic of a liberal democracy. Yet, this was a negligible denigration of speech such as the banning of an IAW poster at Carleton University. Do we forget that these same IAW supporters prevented current Israeli PM Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University in 2003 by violently rioting? And do we forget that university administrators shamefully capitulated to the doctrinaire ideologues?
Near the end of the petition, the authors state: “We do not believe that Israel acts in self-defense.” Israel, they argue, is the largest recipient of US aid at $3 million per day. It also has “the fourth strongest army in the world.” The last claim cannot be corroborated because how do we test the “strongest army in the world”? Is it technological sophistication, manpower, training readiness, or esprit de corps? In terms of manpower, Israel cannot be the fourth strongest army because the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, Britain, and France all have larger armies than Israel.
From a realist perspective, all states in an anarchical international system seek to augment their power, will use violence to do so, and will seek to get an upper hand on their regional foes. Israel is no different from other states, yet it is treated like the pariah among world states. Furthermore, if we follow the realist logic, states sometimes have to act offensively to avert greater catastrophes (i.e., state survival) or to aggrandize their power. In its history Israel has acted defensively in 1948 and offensively as in the Six-Day War in 1967 because they feared an imminent attack by Arab armies. When Israel struck the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981, it acted offensively yet in a defensive capacity against a Ba’athist regime that openly threatened its existence. The theocratic, genocidal Iranian regime today presents Israel with similar difficulties should it acquire nuclear weapons. Finally, if Israel acted offensively in Lebanon (1982 and 2006) and Gaza in 2008-9 the operations were also defensive counter-reactions to non-state terrorist groups that seek its destruction and threaten the security of its citizens.
The petition ends with an unintended ironic note. The signatories twice reject “specious claims of anti-Semitism” and “false charges of anti-Semitism” for those that criticize Israel. Why so much barking about anti-Semitism by the signatories? Could it be that they bark too much because they have the most to hide? They call for freedom of speech and “legitimate criticism of Israel.” The problem is that the IAW “progressives” do not engage in “legitimate criticism of Israel.” Israel is singled out among the community of nations, allusions to unsubstantiated Jewish power are made, and IAW calls for a “one-state solution” that would in effect lead to the liquidation of Jewish and democratic Israel.
The sad reality is that there is a more reasoned examination of Israeli “apartheid” at Israeli universities or Ha’aretz than the petition in question or IAW debates on Canadian campuses. This speaks to the poverty of authentic political debate in Canada, the sloganeering moral righteousness, and the desire for partisanship rather than genuine solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy.
In conclusion, the silent majority of Canadian Jews would probably express the gravest concern about “Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of Israel.” The manifesto highlights the psychological delusions of left-wing “progressives” that follow fads with the hope that they will one day be saved by their tormentors. The manifesto comes at a time when the worldwide demonisation of Israel has reached fever pitch. Criticism of Israel has become the Che Guevara chic of recent years. It is good for academic careers. How can there be suppression of criticism of Israel when criticism of the state has become fashionable? The chorus of anti-Zionists runs the gamut from Islamist theocrats to European left-wingers, and conspiracy theorists of the Icke mould to North American neo-Marxist secularists. And anti-Semites of a traditional hue. Icke disingenuously denies that he fits the anti-Semitic category, despite his position that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a political truth. The downplaying of any anti-Semitic motives by the signatories is both farcical and tragic. What the signatories fail to realize is that Israel’s foes are coming for the Jews and democracy. There will be no distinction between good Jew and bad Jew. If Israel fails, not one of us will remain.
Tamir Bar-On
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Hatred to Hope
Hatred to Hope
I wrote a book, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, on fascism after the official defeats of Fascism in Nazism in 1945. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can sample the Introduction here:
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9383&edition_id=10650
The thesis of Where Have All The Fascists Gone? is that fascists no longer openly wave the fascist banner, but increasingly dress their proto-fascist views in New Left, Left, and even ecological guises. Born in France at the time of the 1968 student and worker protests, the nouvelle droite (New Right) or European New Right (ENR) intellectuals led by Alain de Benoist sought to revitalise fascist ideology in the age after defeat. They distinguished themselves from the Anglo-American New Right (ANNR) by being anti-capitalist and obsessed with questions of identity, cultural preservation, and regional and national belonging along homogeneous lines. They also distance themselves from the Old Right, with its penchant for grabbing power through legal, parliamentary or violent, extraparliamentary terrorist tactics. Remember that the Fascists and Nazis utilized both legal and illegal techniques, the gun and the ballot box, to come to power.
Here comes de Benoist, a winner of France's top literary prize in 1977 for his Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), who argues that it is culture and civil society that will give the Right durable power. He borrows a page from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Fascist jail in 1937. De Benoist has been called a proponent of "right-wing Gramscianism." Nietzsche is another idol because the German philosopher saw culture and virulent elites as the saviours of Europe from a period of profound egalitarian "decadence" born of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In his youth, de Benoist was a supporter of French ultra-nationalism, colonialism in Algeria, and extolled the virtues of soldierly values from white settlers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to the German Conservative Revolutionaries (CR) of the inter-war years such as Ernst Junger and Moeller van den Bruck. The CR thinkers had an undeniable influence on the Nazis, while seeking to distance themselves from mere Nazi "plebeianism" or populism.
By the 1970s de Benoist became more subtle. He understood that one could no longer be openly fascist or Nazi. Thus he based his new strategy on the "right to difference" of all cultures, regions, and nations against the "totalitarian" menaces of Washington and Moscow. He railed against both Marxist socialism and liberal capitalist democracies. When the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union fell officially in 1991, he turned his venom against liberalism and the United States (its main proponent worldwide) as the "primary enemies." He has sought to rally all those that reject liberalism from European nationalists, regionalists, and racists to Islamists, Traditionalists, and ecologists. His anti-Americanism rose to a fever pitch in the post-9-11 climate with US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He views the United States as an imperialist force, which is the most destructive in human history.
De Benoist is no isolated intellectual. Movements like his have spread throughout Europe. Moreover, extreme right-wing and neo-fascist political parties with an anti-immigrant agenda have made steady inroads in Western Europe since the 1980s. France's Front National (National Front) under the charismatic influence of Jean-Marie Le Pen is one example. The Front National gave France an international black eye when it reached the final round of the French Presidential elections with about 17 per cent of the popular vote in 2005, before Le Pen was trounced by Gaullist Jacques Chirac. Austria's anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined the national coalition government in 2000. In Italy, the neo-fascist National Alliance joined the national coalition government in 1994 and participated in several governing coalitions under Berlusconi in the new millennium. The National Alliance leader, Gianfranco Fini, became Italy's deputy prime minister in 2003. In 2008, Rome elected a National Alliance mayor, as Fascist era songs were sung in the city's public square. The National Alliance sits in the current government, although they have decided to merge with Berlusconi's broad conservative, right-wing coalition.
Without the intellectual ground prepared for by de Benoist and the European New Right, the extreme right-wing parties would not be flourishing. These parties respond to the decline of the hard communist left, the corruption of established parties, the loss of national sovereignty due to the European Union (EU), and increasing anguish about liberalism, democracy, capitalism, multiculturalism, and the loss of values associated with modernity. A Le Pen appeals to the native-born French man or woman who feels left out by a heartless global capitalism, EU distancing mechanisms vis-a-vis ordinary workers and farmers, and bureaucratic statism. He appeals to an older, mystical France based on biological rather than civic notions of belonging. He appeals to a "populist nativism," as Jens Rydgren points out, that says welfare benefits and citizenship belongs to those with a rootedness in the soil of France, its history, language, and civilizational greatness.
Yet, Le Pen, like de Benoist, says he is no racist or fascist. He is for the "right to difference" of all cultures to follow their own national paths free of US, EU, or corporate dictates. The upshot is that racism and hate come in older and newer guises: Open biological racism and anti-Semitism that justified colonialism and Nazism, as well as subtle forms that claim to uphold "our" "right to difference" so long as "we" can keep out "them" (immigrants, refugees, non-Christians, non-Europeans). In twisted logic, Le Pen and de Benoist say that the multicultural, anti-racists of France and Europe are the real racists! They deny the "French French" the right to determine their own, independent, homogeneous cultural and political paths.
Now Le Pen and de Benoist do not come from an explicit fascist tradition. They come from traditions that have sympathized with colonialism and Vichyism. De Benoist is particularly indebted to the inter-war Conservative Revolution that essentially provided intellectual whitewashing for Nazi crimes against humanity. Yet, the traditions are so close that they come from a common spiritual, political family. It is a political family that rejects the egalitarian impulses of the 1789 French Revolution. It wishes to turn citizenship into a biological construction. It hopes to overturn democracy, parliamentarism, and administrative, legal equality for all citizens of a given national territory. This is a dark and sinister project that harkens back to Nazi Nuremberg race laws and anti-Semitic legislation against Jews in Italy after 1938.
We should be under no illusions. Fascism, or an ideology that no longer calls itself that, can come back under the most innocent disguises. Both Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and his compatriot Umberto Eco have warned Europe about a fascism returning that will no longer "march on Rome" or openly call for the destruction of Jews or other cultural and political minorities. De Benoist is part of this clever project. It is winning adherents throughout Europe. The hope is to identify the danger in political projects that claim to be "new," yet smack of older formulations from a tragic period in European history. The hope is in saying that liberal democracy has serious problems, which gives these anti-immigrant parties appeal in the first place. The hope is in rising to a common humanity, while preserving our cultural distinctiveness. Immigrants cannot be our foes, if we ourselves have lost our own identities. The hope is that economic, environmental, and political crises will not seduce us with authoritarian, elitist ideologies that seek to divide people and nations.
De Benoist's hope is for a pagan, elitist, hierarchical, Europe. This hope will lead Europeans to more pain and misery, just as in the inter-war years. De Benoist also speaks of direct democracy, a direct democracy designed to make it acceptable in national or regional referenda to keep out non-European immigrants. Genuine direct democracy is for all the world to taste. It does not pick and choose based on common biological origins. It is the hope of an inclusive belonging to a political community that makes its own political decisions, free of dogmatic intellectual formulas, political parties, corporations, bureaucracies, mass media, or state-led engineering. It is the hope of relegating ideologies of hatred to the dustbin of history.
Tamir Bar-On
I wrote a book, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, on fascism after the official defeats of Fascism in Nazism in 1945. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can sample the Introduction here:
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9383&edition_id=10650
The thesis of Where Have All The Fascists Gone? is that fascists no longer openly wave the fascist banner, but increasingly dress their proto-fascist views in New Left, Left, and even ecological guises. Born in France at the time of the 1968 student and worker protests, the nouvelle droite (New Right) or European New Right (ENR) intellectuals led by Alain de Benoist sought to revitalise fascist ideology in the age after defeat. They distinguished themselves from the Anglo-American New Right (ANNR) by being anti-capitalist and obsessed with questions of identity, cultural preservation, and regional and national belonging along homogeneous lines. They also distance themselves from the Old Right, with its penchant for grabbing power through legal, parliamentary or violent, extraparliamentary terrorist tactics. Remember that the Fascists and Nazis utilized both legal and illegal techniques, the gun and the ballot box, to come to power.
Here comes de Benoist, a winner of France's top literary prize in 1977 for his Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), who argues that it is culture and civil society that will give the Right durable power. He borrows a page from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Fascist jail in 1937. De Benoist has been called a proponent of "right-wing Gramscianism." Nietzsche is another idol because the German philosopher saw culture and virulent elites as the saviours of Europe from a period of profound egalitarian "decadence" born of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In his youth, de Benoist was a supporter of French ultra-nationalism, colonialism in Algeria, and extolled the virtues of soldierly values from white settlers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to the German Conservative Revolutionaries (CR) of the inter-war years such as Ernst Junger and Moeller van den Bruck. The CR thinkers had an undeniable influence on the Nazis, while seeking to distance themselves from mere Nazi "plebeianism" or populism.
By the 1970s de Benoist became more subtle. He understood that one could no longer be openly fascist or Nazi. Thus he based his new strategy on the "right to difference" of all cultures, regions, and nations against the "totalitarian" menaces of Washington and Moscow. He railed against both Marxist socialism and liberal capitalist democracies. When the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union fell officially in 1991, he turned his venom against liberalism and the United States (its main proponent worldwide) as the "primary enemies." He has sought to rally all those that reject liberalism from European nationalists, regionalists, and racists to Islamists, Traditionalists, and ecologists. His anti-Americanism rose to a fever pitch in the post-9-11 climate with US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He views the United States as an imperialist force, which is the most destructive in human history.
De Benoist is no isolated intellectual. Movements like his have spread throughout Europe. Moreover, extreme right-wing and neo-fascist political parties with an anti-immigrant agenda have made steady inroads in Western Europe since the 1980s. France's Front National (National Front) under the charismatic influence of Jean-Marie Le Pen is one example. The Front National gave France an international black eye when it reached the final round of the French Presidential elections with about 17 per cent of the popular vote in 2005, before Le Pen was trounced by Gaullist Jacques Chirac. Austria's anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined the national coalition government in 2000. In Italy, the neo-fascist National Alliance joined the national coalition government in 1994 and participated in several governing coalitions under Berlusconi in the new millennium. The National Alliance leader, Gianfranco Fini, became Italy's deputy prime minister in 2003. In 2008, Rome elected a National Alliance mayor, as Fascist era songs were sung in the city's public square. The National Alliance sits in the current government, although they have decided to merge with Berlusconi's broad conservative, right-wing coalition.
Without the intellectual ground prepared for by de Benoist and the European New Right, the extreme right-wing parties would not be flourishing. These parties respond to the decline of the hard communist left, the corruption of established parties, the loss of national sovereignty due to the European Union (EU), and increasing anguish about liberalism, democracy, capitalism, multiculturalism, and the loss of values associated with modernity. A Le Pen appeals to the native-born French man or woman who feels left out by a heartless global capitalism, EU distancing mechanisms vis-a-vis ordinary workers and farmers, and bureaucratic statism. He appeals to an older, mystical France based on biological rather than civic notions of belonging. He appeals to a "populist nativism," as Jens Rydgren points out, that says welfare benefits and citizenship belongs to those with a rootedness in the soil of France, its history, language, and civilizational greatness.
Yet, Le Pen, like de Benoist, says he is no racist or fascist. He is for the "right to difference" of all cultures to follow their own national paths free of US, EU, or corporate dictates. The upshot is that racism and hate come in older and newer guises: Open biological racism and anti-Semitism that justified colonialism and Nazism, as well as subtle forms that claim to uphold "our" "right to difference" so long as "we" can keep out "them" (immigrants, refugees, non-Christians, non-Europeans). In twisted logic, Le Pen and de Benoist say that the multicultural, anti-racists of France and Europe are the real racists! They deny the "French French" the right to determine their own, independent, homogeneous cultural and political paths.
Now Le Pen and de Benoist do not come from an explicit fascist tradition. They come from traditions that have sympathized with colonialism and Vichyism. De Benoist is particularly indebted to the inter-war Conservative Revolution that essentially provided intellectual whitewashing for Nazi crimes against humanity. Yet, the traditions are so close that they come from a common spiritual, political family. It is a political family that rejects the egalitarian impulses of the 1789 French Revolution. It wishes to turn citizenship into a biological construction. It hopes to overturn democracy, parliamentarism, and administrative, legal equality for all citizens of a given national territory. This is a dark and sinister project that harkens back to Nazi Nuremberg race laws and anti-Semitic legislation against Jews in Italy after 1938.
We should be under no illusions. Fascism, or an ideology that no longer calls itself that, can come back under the most innocent disguises. Both Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and his compatriot Umberto Eco have warned Europe about a fascism returning that will no longer "march on Rome" or openly call for the destruction of Jews or other cultural and political minorities. De Benoist is part of this clever project. It is winning adherents throughout Europe. The hope is to identify the danger in political projects that claim to be "new," yet smack of older formulations from a tragic period in European history. The hope is in saying that liberal democracy has serious problems, which gives these anti-immigrant parties appeal in the first place. The hope is in rising to a common humanity, while preserving our cultural distinctiveness. Immigrants cannot be our foes, if we ourselves have lost our own identities. The hope is that economic, environmental, and political crises will not seduce us with authoritarian, elitist ideologies that seek to divide people and nations.
De Benoist's hope is for a pagan, elitist, hierarchical, Europe. This hope will lead Europeans to more pain and misery, just as in the inter-war years. De Benoist also speaks of direct democracy, a direct democracy designed to make it acceptable in national or regional referenda to keep out non-European immigrants. Genuine direct democracy is for all the world to taste. It does not pick and choose based on common biological origins. It is the hope of an inclusive belonging to a political community that makes its own political decisions, free of dogmatic intellectual formulas, political parties, corporations, bureaucracies, mass media, or state-led engineering. It is the hope of relegating ideologies of hatred to the dustbin of history.
Tamir Bar-On
Friday, April 24, 2009
Galloway to God
Galloway to God
Have we forgotten the worldwide violence in the Muslim world surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa on his head by Iran’s mullahs? Or, the 2005 cartoon scandal in which the prophet Muhammad was depicted as a human bomb by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten? More recently, controversial British MP George Galloway was barred from entering Canada for a speaking engagement in Toronto on March 30 because of his material support for Hamas, an outlawed terrorist organization in Canada. In turn, Galloway has backed the British government denying entrance to Geert Wilders, the anti-immigrant Dutch politician because his film Fitna paints Islam as a terrorist faith. Unfortunately, all political movements and regimes sometimes play God in respect of free speech.
Free speech problems have intensified in my own country: Canada. During “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW) from March 1-8, Carleton University took the step of banning the IAW poster: A defenseless Palestinian child about to be bombed by an Israeli jet. B’nai Brith sought to muzzle IAW, insisting it is a “hate-festival” that promotes demonisation of Jews under the cover of anti-Zionism.
In 2008, a human rights tribunal case against The Western Standard was finally dropped after complaints from Muslim groups as the press outlet decided to reprint the twelve Danish cartoons from Jyllands-Posten. In 2006, the Canadian Islamic Congress unsuccessfully sought to sue Maclean’s for a Marc Steyn article about the rise of Muslims as a political constituency that it claimed was Islamophobic. In disturbing events at Concordia University in 2003, university administrators shamefully gave in to violent student rioters seeking to prevent a speaking engagement from current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
What do all of these cases have in common? What do they say about free speech in Canada? They are united by chilling attempts of political movements or regimes to undermine political speech, the central value of a liberal democratic society. The hallmark of any democracy is the peaceful alternation of governments. This is only possible through the collision of divergent worldviews and political ideologies, as well as the legal protection of political speech.
The instinct of too many political movements is to ban odious speech of their opponents. In short, to play God when determining who can say what and where. Our government ought to know better. They must accord political speech the highest protection, even if it offends us. The alternative is a nanny state that jealously guards what it is we hear. We should promote healthy skepticism vis-à-vis political movements or governments that call for the silencing of free speech in the name of abstract “Canadian values,” “Peace, Order, and Good Government,” or disturbing moral or religious sensibilities. Are Canadian citizens young children that must be shielded from what others say?
Second, the cases highlighted also share the reality that political speech is often an absolute for our political cause or regime, but a privilege that can be taken away from our political foes. Galloway has became a free speech cause celebre for the left in Canada, while the British MP cannot stretch his arm out to extend the right to free speech to his right-wing Dutch political enemy Geert Wilders. IAW offended the sensibilities of many Canadian Jews, but Arab groups supported its presence in 13 Canadian cities. These same Arab groups were offended by Marc Steyn’s article and turned to legal mechanisms to silence its message. They also voiced outrage over the decision of The Western Standard to reprint the inflammatory Danish cartoons. While the IAW crowd promotes it as a free speech question in respect of Palestinian rights, one wonders if they might not call for the banning of festivals entitled Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Libyan or Gaza Palestine apartheid weeks, as Jews have been cleansed from those societies?
Thirdly, the free speech cases illustrate what the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper called the “democratic paradox”: Illiberal, anti-democratic political movements can utilize the liberal parliamentary framework to annul democratic processes. Did not the Nazi Party use Weimar’s parliamentary system only to abolish democracy in 1933? Did not an Islamist party, Hamas, win elections in Gaza in 2007 and proceed to liquidate Fatah secularists and democracy?
As the aforementioned examples demonstrate, democracy is a risky and open-ended historical process. Admittedly, the Nazi case was no mere free speech issue. It was a failure to clamp down on a movement that was annihilationist and used illegal violence in its rise to power. Nazis were outlandishly tolerated by timorous political elites. The final fateful error was made by an ailing President to incredibly grant Hitler the post of Chancellor after the Nazis systematically and violently targeted leftists and Jews.
In the Nazi and Hamas cases, people willingly escaped from freedom towards state authoritarianism and genocidal ideologies. In our free speech cases, we have the whiff of anti-democratic extremism and the desire to silence political foes. We have the worrying signs of creeping authoritarianism.
No doubt free expression is never an absolute, even in a liberal democracy. One cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre as it will cause “imminent harm and danger.” One cannot use national public radio to call for the extermination of specific ethnic groups. This is what the genocidal Hutu-led regime did to whip up hatred of Tutsis in 1994 resulting in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. One cannot, as a public educator of young children, teach that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax. This is what state-led media tragically teaches in theocratic Iran.
A liberal democracy like Canada must be cognizant that political speech is the highest constitutionally protected speech because of its impact on the functioning of a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. We cannot hypocritically protect political speech, only if it does not offend us. Political correctness does not cut it because it expresses the machinations of narrow partisan movements. As Canadians we must be less polite and understand that the political arena is a passionate realm that will have noxious views.
All politics, argued Carl Schmitt, was a struggle between friends and foes of antagonistic political camps. When we muzzle our political foes, we jettison the struggle for power that is politics. We accept the struggle of competing sports teams when Toronto FC plays the Los Angeles Galaxy. Why do we plays gods when it comes to protecting political speech of our opponents and the future of Canadian democracy?
Tamir Bar-On
Have we forgotten the worldwide violence in the Muslim world surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa on his head by Iran’s mullahs? Or, the 2005 cartoon scandal in which the prophet Muhammad was depicted as a human bomb by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten? More recently, controversial British MP George Galloway was barred from entering Canada for a speaking engagement in Toronto on March 30 because of his material support for Hamas, an outlawed terrorist organization in Canada. In turn, Galloway has backed the British government denying entrance to Geert Wilders, the anti-immigrant Dutch politician because his film Fitna paints Islam as a terrorist faith. Unfortunately, all political movements and regimes sometimes play God in respect of free speech.
Free speech problems have intensified in my own country: Canada. During “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW) from March 1-8, Carleton University took the step of banning the IAW poster: A defenseless Palestinian child about to be bombed by an Israeli jet. B’nai Brith sought to muzzle IAW, insisting it is a “hate-festival” that promotes demonisation of Jews under the cover of anti-Zionism.
In 2008, a human rights tribunal case against The Western Standard was finally dropped after complaints from Muslim groups as the press outlet decided to reprint the twelve Danish cartoons from Jyllands-Posten. In 2006, the Canadian Islamic Congress unsuccessfully sought to sue Maclean’s for a Marc Steyn article about the rise of Muslims as a political constituency that it claimed was Islamophobic. In disturbing events at Concordia University in 2003, university administrators shamefully gave in to violent student rioters seeking to prevent a speaking engagement from current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
What do all of these cases have in common? What do they say about free speech in Canada? They are united by chilling attempts of political movements or regimes to undermine political speech, the central value of a liberal democratic society. The hallmark of any democracy is the peaceful alternation of governments. This is only possible through the collision of divergent worldviews and political ideologies, as well as the legal protection of political speech.
The instinct of too many political movements is to ban odious speech of their opponents. In short, to play God when determining who can say what and where. Our government ought to know better. They must accord political speech the highest protection, even if it offends us. The alternative is a nanny state that jealously guards what it is we hear. We should promote healthy skepticism vis-à-vis political movements or governments that call for the silencing of free speech in the name of abstract “Canadian values,” “Peace, Order, and Good Government,” or disturbing moral or religious sensibilities. Are Canadian citizens young children that must be shielded from what others say?
Second, the cases highlighted also share the reality that political speech is often an absolute for our political cause or regime, but a privilege that can be taken away from our political foes. Galloway has became a free speech cause celebre for the left in Canada, while the British MP cannot stretch his arm out to extend the right to free speech to his right-wing Dutch political enemy Geert Wilders. IAW offended the sensibilities of many Canadian Jews, but Arab groups supported its presence in 13 Canadian cities. These same Arab groups were offended by Marc Steyn’s article and turned to legal mechanisms to silence its message. They also voiced outrage over the decision of The Western Standard to reprint the inflammatory Danish cartoons. While the IAW crowd promotes it as a free speech question in respect of Palestinian rights, one wonders if they might not call for the banning of festivals entitled Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Libyan or Gaza Palestine apartheid weeks, as Jews have been cleansed from those societies?
Thirdly, the free speech cases illustrate what the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper called the “democratic paradox”: Illiberal, anti-democratic political movements can utilize the liberal parliamentary framework to annul democratic processes. Did not the Nazi Party use Weimar’s parliamentary system only to abolish democracy in 1933? Did not an Islamist party, Hamas, win elections in Gaza in 2007 and proceed to liquidate Fatah secularists and democracy?
As the aforementioned examples demonstrate, democracy is a risky and open-ended historical process. Admittedly, the Nazi case was no mere free speech issue. It was a failure to clamp down on a movement that was annihilationist and used illegal violence in its rise to power. Nazis were outlandishly tolerated by timorous political elites. The final fateful error was made by an ailing President to incredibly grant Hitler the post of Chancellor after the Nazis systematically and violently targeted leftists and Jews.
In the Nazi and Hamas cases, people willingly escaped from freedom towards state authoritarianism and genocidal ideologies. In our free speech cases, we have the whiff of anti-democratic extremism and the desire to silence political foes. We have the worrying signs of creeping authoritarianism.
No doubt free expression is never an absolute, even in a liberal democracy. One cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre as it will cause “imminent harm and danger.” One cannot use national public radio to call for the extermination of specific ethnic groups. This is what the genocidal Hutu-led regime did to whip up hatred of Tutsis in 1994 resulting in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. One cannot, as a public educator of young children, teach that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax. This is what state-led media tragically teaches in theocratic Iran.
A liberal democracy like Canada must be cognizant that political speech is the highest constitutionally protected speech because of its impact on the functioning of a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. We cannot hypocritically protect political speech, only if it does not offend us. Political correctness does not cut it because it expresses the machinations of narrow partisan movements. As Canadians we must be less polite and understand that the political arena is a passionate realm that will have noxious views.
All politics, argued Carl Schmitt, was a struggle between friends and foes of antagonistic political camps. When we muzzle our political foes, we jettison the struggle for power that is politics. We accept the struggle of competing sports teams when Toronto FC plays the Los Angeles Galaxy. Why do we plays gods when it comes to protecting political speech of our opponents and the future of Canadian democracy?
Tamir Bar-On
Thursday, April 23, 2009
F is for Feeling and Fighting
F is for Feeling and Fighting
Today I would like to speak about feeling and fighting. Odd I know! When I say feeling I mean to feel the grandeur of life and death, to awake to yourself, others, the world, the world beyond the worlds, worlds of the imagination, worlds they have not told you about!
And why do I put feeling side-by-side with fighting? Because one must fight internally in the depths of one's being to feel life, ourselves, others. Too many in modern, technological society walk around numbed, indifferent, today the same as yesterday and all the other days.
Life is a gift. And we must fight against conformity to feel, to think critically, to connect with humanity and the non-human worlds. With feelin' and fightin' in mind (and remember never a fight against others because they are different), I offer you poetry today from the depths of my feeling and fighting soul. I fight each day to remain who I am, to feel the depth and breadth of life, to awaken to new truths, surprises, awe, wonderment, and love. I fight inside myself so that I am not deadened by the so-called "rat race," the cult of money, the alleged salvation of new technological gadgets, the false liberation of hero and state worship. After a while, it is no longer a fight. It becomes a labour of love.
I am a political science professor, but poetry is integral to my feeling and fighting! Here are some of my recent poems below. I offer you a range of subjects from love to politics and more! The last one might shock and touch the roots of your being!
Of The Condition of Love
The winds whistled without conditions.
The rains moistened the red-clay earth on condition of anonymity.
When love’s boat crashes, is it due to conditional requirements,
Or the absence of unconditional love?
How can love rhyme the tune of the unconditional?
Only unknown gods high in the sky live in the realm of the unconditional.
We mere mortals prepare conditions,
Even as we speak the language of unconditional love.
Beware those that invoke unconditional love: They cheat!
They are like those people that invoke humanity.
They lie to give themselves a good name.
Unconditional love is an escape clause,
For those unfit for the vicissitudes of love’s tides.
Love is inevitably stamped with conditions,
As surely as the planets circulating around the sun.
Its conditions are harsh like January’s winter winds in Winnipeg.
Even if you stand the test of love’s harsh conditions,
Like Sisyphus, you must push the rock of love up the mountain every day,
Certain that it will fall by night’s fall.
Then you begin the task of love all over again the next day.
So next time you fall in love remember that love is rarely unconditional.
Love is conditional, whether you poured out abundant love,
Or you were miserly when love called.
Those conditions of love are the walls that imbue meaning for prisoners seeking Freedom.
(Tamir Bar-On, April 14, 2009)
I Lie At The Edge of The Road
I lie at the edge of the road,
Dusty memories roaring like engines
Ready for take-off.
I suppose I can look inside again,
Wandering through the cavernous cave of my soul
Sailing on a boat in an unknown ocean with no destination.
Instead I lie at the edge of the road,
My drunkenness your words painting my body
Like an animist ritual in a lost time.
I lie at the edge of the road contemplating your body’s azure temple,
The way your spirit elevates our universe.
From far away our thoughts can be heard.
Our spirits move silently, separately like the solitary three-toed sloth.
Yet you listen, I know you listen, to the silences,
The silences that you love as much as my words.
I want to perfume you with gifts, pearls of the heart,
The ebbs and flows of my tides, the roaring thunder of universes waiting to be born.
I suppose I can look inside again,
Yet I look to you,
As if you were my shadow,
The one that was there when we first kindled a fire
At the edge of the road in a time that history will not record.
(Tamir Bar-On, April 19, 2009)
They Hope To Be Spared One Day
They hope to be spared one day.
Perhaps saved from a second Holocaust?
So they join the ritualistic chorus that chants
“Death to the Jews” at anti-Zionist marches.
Who will save them?
The rabid right-wing anti-Semites?
The Islamists that long for a theocratic state,
Cleansed of “Jews and Crusaders”?
The “progressives” that would not shudder if Israel was extinguished in flames?
When I was young, I longed for political acceptance.
Today after Pale of Settlement, expulsions from Libya and Egypt,
The Holocaust, suicide bombers in New York and Tel-Aviv, and genocidal Iran,
I know who I am.
Killing fields tell you who you are.
They are the signposts of your identity.
Political acceptance is a luxury like the diamonds I don’t have.
A mighty struggle is here, or perhaps it's coming.
I know that I will not be spared.
I know that the illusion of good Jew and bad Jew,
Gracious Jew and eternally cruel Israel
Is an absurd joke.
Once the killing begins it's too late.
The moralizers of the world will not be awakened.
When the machetes come out, as if to remind us of another age,
We will hear murmurs of dissent
Because of the sight of children without ears or heads.
The howling horrors of winter nihilism are upon us.
Springs and summers will fade into autumn rust,
But winter nihilism is here to stay.
My people awake!
Awake my people!
My once awake people why do you sleep?
You will not be spared.
There will be no good night, nor gentleness.
Next time not one of us will remain.
(Tamir Bar-On, March 4, 2009)
Tamir Bar-On
Today I would like to speak about feeling and fighting. Odd I know! When I say feeling I mean to feel the grandeur of life and death, to awake to yourself, others, the world, the world beyond the worlds, worlds of the imagination, worlds they have not told you about!
And why do I put feeling side-by-side with fighting? Because one must fight internally in the depths of one's being to feel life, ourselves, others. Too many in modern, technological society walk around numbed, indifferent, today the same as yesterday and all the other days.
Life is a gift. And we must fight against conformity to feel, to think critically, to connect with humanity and the non-human worlds. With feelin' and fightin' in mind (and remember never a fight against others because they are different), I offer you poetry today from the depths of my feeling and fighting soul. I fight each day to remain who I am, to feel the depth and breadth of life, to awaken to new truths, surprises, awe, wonderment, and love. I fight inside myself so that I am not deadened by the so-called "rat race," the cult of money, the alleged salvation of new technological gadgets, the false liberation of hero and state worship. After a while, it is no longer a fight. It becomes a labour of love.
I am a political science professor, but poetry is integral to my feeling and fighting! Here are some of my recent poems below. I offer you a range of subjects from love to politics and more! The last one might shock and touch the roots of your being!
Of The Condition of Love
The winds whistled without conditions.
The rains moistened the red-clay earth on condition of anonymity.
When love’s boat crashes, is it due to conditional requirements,
Or the absence of unconditional love?
How can love rhyme the tune of the unconditional?
Only unknown gods high in the sky live in the realm of the unconditional.
We mere mortals prepare conditions,
Even as we speak the language of unconditional love.
Beware those that invoke unconditional love: They cheat!
They are like those people that invoke humanity.
They lie to give themselves a good name.
Unconditional love is an escape clause,
For those unfit for the vicissitudes of love’s tides.
Love is inevitably stamped with conditions,
As surely as the planets circulating around the sun.
Its conditions are harsh like January’s winter winds in Winnipeg.
Even if you stand the test of love’s harsh conditions,
Like Sisyphus, you must push the rock of love up the mountain every day,
Certain that it will fall by night’s fall.
Then you begin the task of love all over again the next day.
So next time you fall in love remember that love is rarely unconditional.
Love is conditional, whether you poured out abundant love,
Or you were miserly when love called.
Those conditions of love are the walls that imbue meaning for prisoners seeking Freedom.
(Tamir Bar-On, April 14, 2009)
I Lie At The Edge of The Road
I lie at the edge of the road,
Dusty memories roaring like engines
Ready for take-off.
I suppose I can look inside again,
Wandering through the cavernous cave of my soul
Sailing on a boat in an unknown ocean with no destination.
Instead I lie at the edge of the road,
My drunkenness your words painting my body
Like an animist ritual in a lost time.
I lie at the edge of the road contemplating your body’s azure temple,
The way your spirit elevates our universe.
From far away our thoughts can be heard.
Our spirits move silently, separately like the solitary three-toed sloth.
Yet you listen, I know you listen, to the silences,
The silences that you love as much as my words.
I want to perfume you with gifts, pearls of the heart,
The ebbs and flows of my tides, the roaring thunder of universes waiting to be born.
I suppose I can look inside again,
Yet I look to you,
As if you were my shadow,
The one that was there when we first kindled a fire
At the edge of the road in a time that history will not record.
(Tamir Bar-On, April 19, 2009)
They Hope To Be Spared One Day
They hope to be spared one day.
Perhaps saved from a second Holocaust?
So they join the ritualistic chorus that chants
“Death to the Jews” at anti-Zionist marches.
Who will save them?
The rabid right-wing anti-Semites?
The Islamists that long for a theocratic state,
Cleansed of “Jews and Crusaders”?
The “progressives” that would not shudder if Israel was extinguished in flames?
When I was young, I longed for political acceptance.
Today after Pale of Settlement, expulsions from Libya and Egypt,
The Holocaust, suicide bombers in New York and Tel-Aviv, and genocidal Iran,
I know who I am.
Killing fields tell you who you are.
They are the signposts of your identity.
Political acceptance is a luxury like the diamonds I don’t have.
A mighty struggle is here, or perhaps it's coming.
I know that I will not be spared.
I know that the illusion of good Jew and bad Jew,
Gracious Jew and eternally cruel Israel
Is an absurd joke.
Once the killing begins it's too late.
The moralizers of the world will not be awakened.
When the machetes come out, as if to remind us of another age,
We will hear murmurs of dissent
Because of the sight of children without ears or heads.
The howling horrors of winter nihilism are upon us.
Springs and summers will fade into autumn rust,
But winter nihilism is here to stay.
My people awake!
Awake my people!
My once awake people why do you sleep?
You will not be spared.
There will be no good night, nor gentleness.
Next time not one of us will remain.
(Tamir Bar-On, March 4, 2009)
Tamir Bar-On
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
E is for Estates and Escape
E is for Estates and Escape
Obama is the first ever black President elected in the United States. And as an astute American told me, "Obama is the President of the world!" Of this we should be grateful. Obama is a world-changing historical figure that comes around every few hundred years. He is a man of great vision and intellectual acumen. He reaches out to friends and foes alike. He fires all of us that come from minority backgrounds with great hope for a better world based on merit, racial equality, and fairness. Despite rising anti-American sentiments after Afghanistan and Iraq, almost all the world is in love with him.
Yet, most of the world, including Europe, would be incapable of electing a black minority figure like Obama because most people conceive of their nations in homogeneous terms. So bravo to Obama for shattering the veil and giving a positive model to blacks in the United States and minority groups around the planet! May the demonstration effect spread throughout the world!
In spite of the election of Obama, I want to take a contrary position today. I want to suggest that the old feudal estates of the Middle Ages have been recreated in new guises. And the result is that escapism is the rule of the everyday in modern liberal democracies. Our clergy, nobility, and commoners are still with us in the 21th century. We still have monarchs or autocrats, including most of the Muslim world, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and large chunks of Africa. And even in liberal democracies we increasingly have anti-democratic tendencies in the context of the "war on terror," the centralization of power among presidents and prime ministers, and what Vilfredo Pareto would have dubbed a "graveyard of aristocracies".
Of course, liberal democracies are more egalitarian and just than the authoritarian tendencies cited. More people are allowed to participate in the political system and reflect the will of the people. Or demos in the ancient Greek conception of direct democracy. But we should not be self-congratulatory. We ought to be vigilant if we are to protect democracy. Civilized Europe, with a few exceptions, abandoned democracy en masse in the inter-war years. If we are not careful, we can take a similar path. So we must enhance direct democracy in the West. We must undermine representative democracy, the democracy of politicians, political parties, and bureaucratic centralization.
If we fail to involve ordinary people in the political process, we cede the political terrain to the professional politicians. We escape from our political duties as citizens in a liberal democracy. The good thing about the Obama campaign in 2008 is that it energized young people to join the political process. Young people that would have stayed home and merely watched television. When we join the political process to help our communities, regions, and nations, we do not "escape from freedom." Politics can be an act of great emancipation, popular participation, and meaningful change.
Now we no longer have our kings or queens in most of the West, except for ceremonial heads of state in places like Canada and Britain. We do not have rigid estates where birth, Church hierarchy, and property are the ultimate determinants of political life. We have the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789) to thank for these advancements in mass popular participation and democracy.
However, we still have great barriers to political participation, upward mobility, and direct democracy in many Western countries. And even more profound barriers in places such as Iran, Russia, and Sudan. Institutions can act as gatekeepers, keeping out ideas and people that do not reflect the spirit of the institutions. Global capitalist institutions from the North American Free Trade Agreement to International Monetary Fund ultimately undermine national sovereignty, parliaments, and direct democracy. When corporations transcend national borders and are capable of greater wealth than nation-states, we see the power of institutions. When a North African immigrant citizen of France (despite his or her honest efforts) faces grave institutional racism at the hands of employers or the state, then we see the power of institutions. When regions, cities, or villages are held hostage by agri-businesses, oil companies, or national state authorities, then we see the power of institutions.
We are at a great crossroads in human history. Obama is a part of a changing global consciousness; a politics of mass hope. The period of estates, in older and newer guises, is long gone. Sandwiched between environmental and nuclear annihilation, we can longer afford to escape. Our economic models need serious re-evaluation. It is time for a new generation to give us hope, direct democracy, and popular participation.
Tamir Bar-On
Obama is the first ever black President elected in the United States. And as an astute American told me, "Obama is the President of the world!" Of this we should be grateful. Obama is a world-changing historical figure that comes around every few hundred years. He is a man of great vision and intellectual acumen. He reaches out to friends and foes alike. He fires all of us that come from minority backgrounds with great hope for a better world based on merit, racial equality, and fairness. Despite rising anti-American sentiments after Afghanistan and Iraq, almost all the world is in love with him.
Yet, most of the world, including Europe, would be incapable of electing a black minority figure like Obama because most people conceive of their nations in homogeneous terms. So bravo to Obama for shattering the veil and giving a positive model to blacks in the United States and minority groups around the planet! May the demonstration effect spread throughout the world!
In spite of the election of Obama, I want to take a contrary position today. I want to suggest that the old feudal estates of the Middle Ages have been recreated in new guises. And the result is that escapism is the rule of the everyday in modern liberal democracies. Our clergy, nobility, and commoners are still with us in the 21th century. We still have monarchs or autocrats, including most of the Muslim world, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and large chunks of Africa. And even in liberal democracies we increasingly have anti-democratic tendencies in the context of the "war on terror," the centralization of power among presidents and prime ministers, and what Vilfredo Pareto would have dubbed a "graveyard of aristocracies".
Of course, liberal democracies are more egalitarian and just than the authoritarian tendencies cited. More people are allowed to participate in the political system and reflect the will of the people. Or demos in the ancient Greek conception of direct democracy. But we should not be self-congratulatory. We ought to be vigilant if we are to protect democracy. Civilized Europe, with a few exceptions, abandoned democracy en masse in the inter-war years. If we are not careful, we can take a similar path. So we must enhance direct democracy in the West. We must undermine representative democracy, the democracy of politicians, political parties, and bureaucratic centralization.
If we fail to involve ordinary people in the political process, we cede the political terrain to the professional politicians. We escape from our political duties as citizens in a liberal democracy. The good thing about the Obama campaign in 2008 is that it energized young people to join the political process. Young people that would have stayed home and merely watched television. When we join the political process to help our communities, regions, and nations, we do not "escape from freedom." Politics can be an act of great emancipation, popular participation, and meaningful change.
Now we no longer have our kings or queens in most of the West, except for ceremonial heads of state in places like Canada and Britain. We do not have rigid estates where birth, Church hierarchy, and property are the ultimate determinants of political life. We have the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789) to thank for these advancements in mass popular participation and democracy.
However, we still have great barriers to political participation, upward mobility, and direct democracy in many Western countries. And even more profound barriers in places such as Iran, Russia, and Sudan. Institutions can act as gatekeepers, keeping out ideas and people that do not reflect the spirit of the institutions. Global capitalist institutions from the North American Free Trade Agreement to International Monetary Fund ultimately undermine national sovereignty, parliaments, and direct democracy. When corporations transcend national borders and are capable of greater wealth than nation-states, we see the power of institutions. When a North African immigrant citizen of France (despite his or her honest efforts) faces grave institutional racism at the hands of employers or the state, then we see the power of institutions. When regions, cities, or villages are held hostage by agri-businesses, oil companies, or national state authorities, then we see the power of institutions.
We are at a great crossroads in human history. Obama is a part of a changing global consciousness; a politics of mass hope. The period of estates, in older and newer guises, is long gone. Sandwiched between environmental and nuclear annihilation, we can longer afford to escape. Our economic models need serious re-evaluation. It is time for a new generation to give us hope, direct democracy, and popular participation.
Tamir Bar-On
D is for Danger and Dayenu
D is for Danger and Dayenu
A philosophical giant with a sordid philo-Nazi past, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) once declared: "Where is the danger, there grows the saving power also." Heidegger, like Hitler, sadly diagnosed the danger of inter-war years Europe in the Jews. The Jews that were allegedly sapping German, Aryan national "being" through internationalist ideologies such as liberalism, social democracy, and socialism. Heidegger later became a darling of the European left and post-modernism, the pro-Nazi writings conveniently explained away as mere aberrations.
Heidegger was supposedly a deep spiritual thinker in an age that had killed God. Yet, as men and women eternally search for meaning, we needed secular replacements to give us hope. Sadly, I must say as a political scientist, that those hopes for mass redemption came in the form of totalitarian ideologies that resembled what Emilio Gentile called "political religions": Fascism, Nazism, Leninism, and Stalinism. We had killed God and found new gods in the charismatic leader, nation, race, or class. The consequences were dangerous, dark, and an attack on the spirit, soul, and bodies of men and women. The gulags and the concentration camps were the logical conclusions of our 20th century political experiments that sought to create totalitarian, perfect orders where Truth was known by a select few.
What are our contemporary dangers? And how is this related to the Hebrew word "dayenu"? Well, dayenu means "it would have been enough for us." It is a mantra that is chanted in song by Jews during Passover. It is in the hagaddah, which is read during the traditional Passover seder. In the song, Jews give gratitude to God for taking them out of Egyptian slavery, giving them the Sabbath, and the Torah. It is a tune of gratitude for life, existence, our being, community, and God. Had God given the Jewish people one of these aforementioned gifts, the up-beat song says it would have been enough. There are 15 stanzas to dayenu, all with different gifts God bestowed upon the Jewish people. The 15 stanzas are divided into three sections: gratitude for leaving slavery, miracles of God, and being with God. It is a lovely song with one fundamental meaning: Gratitude for life as an awesome, mysterious spiritual project.
Dangers today are many: an environment torn asunder by human greed, an economic crisis that challenges the foundations of our economic system (though nobody on the right or left really wants to say it), the decline of direct democracy, a rising tide of militant Islamism, raging wars, and a spiritual chaos that leads people to value the trinity of money, power, and technology as the secular lords of our age. As in the inter-war years, the dangers are many. And like in those dark days, we have fanatics like Ahmadinejad in Iran, al-Bashir in Sudan (wanted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the genocide in Darfur that has killed 300,000 and sent 2.5 million into exile), and even on university campuses from Toronto to Paris that want the whole heritage of the West and Israel to be extinguished in flames. Left-wing "progressives" increasingly make common cause with Islamists like al-Qaeda in the post-9-11 climate. Dangerous indeed!
There is also a danger that in such times, despite the great hope of Obama, we will want a quick fix of total, all-encompassing solutions that will destroy democracy. We might leap into the arms of despots. Witness the rising political import and legitimization of anti-immigrant political parties in Western Europe since the 1980s from Austria's Freedom Party to Italy's Northern League and France's National Front. There is the danger that established political authorities in the West will further undermine civil liberties in the "war on terror": legal illicit spying on citizens, Guantanamo as the model of the future (Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben), security certificates without charges, etc. The "war on terror" is indeed real, especially for Israelis, Russians, Turks, Sri Lankans, and the United states after 9-11. Yet, we might want to re-conceptualise the "war on terror" to target the larger "war on violence" both at home and abroad. Let me direct you to something I wrote academically on the subject in International Politics in 2005:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/journal/v42/n2/abs/8800108a.html
Every corner of the world has its own dangers. I have diagnosed some common global dangers. There are also preachers, politicians, academics, and journalists shouting about false dangers in order to incite, divide, and accelerate the "walls of hate" (a phrase I picked up from the legendary blues man Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater). Ahmadinejad is one such figure, who repeats crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The sad reality is that some of these theories, in more subtle form, are finding their way to the pages of left-wing columnists such as The Toronto Star's Linda McQuaig. She recently insisted that the decision to ban British MP George Galloway from Canada was the decision of a foreign government: Israel! This despite the fact that, nothwithstanding Galloway's pro-Hamas sympathies, Israel let Galloway into its own country.
Let me now tie dangers and dayenu. Dangers have been with us since the dawn of setting suns. Radical evil is out there in the world and institutions sometimes support that radical evil. Dayenu, however, teaches us gratitude. To wake up with a smile of greeting at the morning sun. To realize that we are all part of the same creation. To recognize that if we demonize one group it is like demonizing all groups. To understand that killing begins in the heart with abstract ideologies of hate and division. To see that the dangers are opportunities to improve ourselves, the planet, its inhabitants.
One does not need to be religious to understand and feel the meaning of gratitude inherent in dayenu. This dayenu is our saving power. Do not believe in the false idols that promise liberation, or false dangers with political agendas. They cheat and lie. Dayenu tells me that the Iranians are my brothers, as are the Palestinians. They will change the world with us. They know deep in their hearts that peace is possible. That two states for two peoples are possible. That they can rise to the task by overthrowing their authoritarian lords. Hamas, Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad, and the monarchs of the Arab world are relics of a time past. They must go. Dayenu tells me that all individuals and nations ought to be free and self-determining. That democracy is not a bad word or an imperialist ruse, but a treasure that must be expanded. The danger is in forgetting the gratitude of dayenu, in forgetting our common humanity.
Tamir Bar-On
A philosophical giant with a sordid philo-Nazi past, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) once declared: "Where is the danger, there grows the saving power also." Heidegger, like Hitler, sadly diagnosed the danger of inter-war years Europe in the Jews. The Jews that were allegedly sapping German, Aryan national "being" through internationalist ideologies such as liberalism, social democracy, and socialism. Heidegger later became a darling of the European left and post-modernism, the pro-Nazi writings conveniently explained away as mere aberrations.
Heidegger was supposedly a deep spiritual thinker in an age that had killed God. Yet, as men and women eternally search for meaning, we needed secular replacements to give us hope. Sadly, I must say as a political scientist, that those hopes for mass redemption came in the form of totalitarian ideologies that resembled what Emilio Gentile called "political religions": Fascism, Nazism, Leninism, and Stalinism. We had killed God and found new gods in the charismatic leader, nation, race, or class. The consequences were dangerous, dark, and an attack on the spirit, soul, and bodies of men and women. The gulags and the concentration camps were the logical conclusions of our 20th century political experiments that sought to create totalitarian, perfect orders where Truth was known by a select few.
What are our contemporary dangers? And how is this related to the Hebrew word "dayenu"? Well, dayenu means "it would have been enough for us." It is a mantra that is chanted in song by Jews during Passover. It is in the hagaddah, which is read during the traditional Passover seder. In the song, Jews give gratitude to God for taking them out of Egyptian slavery, giving them the Sabbath, and the Torah. It is a tune of gratitude for life, existence, our being, community, and God. Had God given the Jewish people one of these aforementioned gifts, the up-beat song says it would have been enough. There are 15 stanzas to dayenu, all with different gifts God bestowed upon the Jewish people. The 15 stanzas are divided into three sections: gratitude for leaving slavery, miracles of God, and being with God. It is a lovely song with one fundamental meaning: Gratitude for life as an awesome, mysterious spiritual project.
Dangers today are many: an environment torn asunder by human greed, an economic crisis that challenges the foundations of our economic system (though nobody on the right or left really wants to say it), the decline of direct democracy, a rising tide of militant Islamism, raging wars, and a spiritual chaos that leads people to value the trinity of money, power, and technology as the secular lords of our age. As in the inter-war years, the dangers are many. And like in those dark days, we have fanatics like Ahmadinejad in Iran, al-Bashir in Sudan (wanted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the genocide in Darfur that has killed 300,000 and sent 2.5 million into exile), and even on university campuses from Toronto to Paris that want the whole heritage of the West and Israel to be extinguished in flames. Left-wing "progressives" increasingly make common cause with Islamists like al-Qaeda in the post-9-11 climate. Dangerous indeed!
There is also a danger that in such times, despite the great hope of Obama, we will want a quick fix of total, all-encompassing solutions that will destroy democracy. We might leap into the arms of despots. Witness the rising political import and legitimization of anti-immigrant political parties in Western Europe since the 1980s from Austria's Freedom Party to Italy's Northern League and France's National Front. There is the danger that established political authorities in the West will further undermine civil liberties in the "war on terror": legal illicit spying on citizens, Guantanamo as the model of the future (Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben), security certificates without charges, etc. The "war on terror" is indeed real, especially for Israelis, Russians, Turks, Sri Lankans, and the United states after 9-11. Yet, we might want to re-conceptualise the "war on terror" to target the larger "war on violence" both at home and abroad. Let me direct you to something I wrote academically on the subject in International Politics in 2005:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/journal/v42/n2/abs/8800108a.html
Every corner of the world has its own dangers. I have diagnosed some common global dangers. There are also preachers, politicians, academics, and journalists shouting about false dangers in order to incite, divide, and accelerate the "walls of hate" (a phrase I picked up from the legendary blues man Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater). Ahmadinejad is one such figure, who repeats crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The sad reality is that some of these theories, in more subtle form, are finding their way to the pages of left-wing columnists such as The Toronto Star's Linda McQuaig. She recently insisted that the decision to ban British MP George Galloway from Canada was the decision of a foreign government: Israel! This despite the fact that, nothwithstanding Galloway's pro-Hamas sympathies, Israel let Galloway into its own country.
Let me now tie dangers and dayenu. Dangers have been with us since the dawn of setting suns. Radical evil is out there in the world and institutions sometimes support that radical evil. Dayenu, however, teaches us gratitude. To wake up with a smile of greeting at the morning sun. To realize that we are all part of the same creation. To recognize that if we demonize one group it is like demonizing all groups. To understand that killing begins in the heart with abstract ideologies of hate and division. To see that the dangers are opportunities to improve ourselves, the planet, its inhabitants.
One does not need to be religious to understand and feel the meaning of gratitude inherent in dayenu. This dayenu is our saving power. Do not believe in the false idols that promise liberation, or false dangers with political agendas. They cheat and lie. Dayenu tells me that the Iranians are my brothers, as are the Palestinians. They will change the world with us. They know deep in their hearts that peace is possible. That two states for two peoples are possible. That they can rise to the task by overthrowing their authoritarian lords. Hamas, Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad, and the monarchs of the Arab world are relics of a time past. They must go. Dayenu tells me that all individuals and nations ought to be free and self-determining. That democracy is not a bad word or an imperialist ruse, but a treasure that must be expanded. The danger is in forgetting the gratitude of dayenu, in forgetting our common humanity.
Tamir Bar-On
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
C is for Canada and Creativity
C is for Canada and Creativity
Canada is the country of "Peace, Order, and Good Government." Those are words from our founding constitutional document. Not very inspiring! It is the land of the hierarchical, British Tory touch that has for too long prized conformity above individual genius. We are a G-8 country with all the tools to become one of the most creative countries in the world. Yet, from the academic world to politics and literature to journalism we respect the pack, the herd, the common positions rather than the solitary instincts of the man (or woman) of genius. For Canada to be more than a mere satellite of our powerful US neighbour, we must begin to breed more of our own geniuses. We must, I dare say, emulate the US in its striving for individual genius and greatness.
All great changes of historical consciousness occur because individuals swam against the tide of mass conformity. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Marx, Nietzsche, Herzl, and countless other figures all swam against the tide of their respective societies. All produced sea changes in the way we see, feel, and live in the world. These changes are ultimately more important than mere alternations of political power, argued Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist that died in a Fascist jail in 1937.
I began my blogging experience, hoping to make a difference and create a sea change in mentalities in Canada and beyond. I combine academic, journalistic, and poetic insights as a way to break boundaries. I want to swim outside the narrow terrains of academia, the insular journalistic politics of the right or left, or the cliques of the literary and poetic worlds. Like the anarchists, who insisted that they want neither masters nor followers, I fight for the right of the creative genius to say no to the herd. Society often crushes geniuses. I write to fire the imagination, to inspire, to mould creative genius. The geniuses will save the world with love, poetic intoxication, a longing for social justice, the struggle for fairness and balance, or merely a new perspective.
Now please do not call me an elitist. I will insist that I can learn as much from a taxi driver or garbage collector as a university professor. Our greatest teachers are often outside the walls of our working lives. Our greatest teachers are usually our most difficult adversaries. Yet, if we give prizes to all those that participate in public school contests, valorise political correctness above substantive discussions, or breed conformity in politics, literature, or academia, we sell ourselves short. We kill those individuals that can make Canada grand, bold, expansive.
Grand and bold thinkers are those that are optimistic, open to change, compassionate, visionary, and radically individualistic. They see the greatness and potential of Canada, but also its weaknesses. And they express these truths openly and with equanimity. Henry David Thoreau was bold and visionary because in the 19th century he refused to pay his poll tax to a US government that supported institutionalized slavery. Barack Obama is a visionary because he had the "audacity of hope," the willingness to reach the highest office of his country despite the obstacles associated with a history of anti-black racism. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were visionaries because they harnessed the powers of love and non-violence to free their peoples from the yoke of oppression.
Canada needs its Thoreau, Gandhi, King, or Obama. Are we ready to elect a black prime minister? How about an Arab or a Jew? Are we ready to publish authors that do not say popular, predictable, nice things about Canada? Are we ready to open all our key positions in the state, civil society, or business to the most competent people? Are we ready to support free thinkers that even challenge their own institutions?
Admittedly, we have our Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, our Marshall McLuhan and George Grant, our Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Yet, too much of Canadian politics, academia, journalism, poetry, and music is filled with conformists. Try publishing a non-leftist article in a left-wing newspaper. Or vice versa, although it might oddly be easier to publish left-wing views in a right-wing paper like The National Post. People that are successful in swimming through Canada's institutions play a game and a role with a precise political agenda. These are clever people, but they are not necessarily great thinkers, visionaries, or even people with noble spirits or characters. The time to follow the herd has past. We live in a global village with many models. Let us learn and be open to the world. Let us rise to the challenge of creating free thinkers. It will be fun, democracy will explode, and the culture of mediocrity protected by the strong and weak alike will fade into mist. Are Canadians up to the challenge?
Tamir Bar-On
Canada is the country of "Peace, Order, and Good Government." Those are words from our founding constitutional document. Not very inspiring! It is the land of the hierarchical, British Tory touch that has for too long prized conformity above individual genius. We are a G-8 country with all the tools to become one of the most creative countries in the world. Yet, from the academic world to politics and literature to journalism we respect the pack, the herd, the common positions rather than the solitary instincts of the man (or woman) of genius. For Canada to be more than a mere satellite of our powerful US neighbour, we must begin to breed more of our own geniuses. We must, I dare say, emulate the US in its striving for individual genius and greatness.
All great changes of historical consciousness occur because individuals swam against the tide of mass conformity. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Marx, Nietzsche, Herzl, and countless other figures all swam against the tide of their respective societies. All produced sea changes in the way we see, feel, and live in the world. These changes are ultimately more important than mere alternations of political power, argued Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist that died in a Fascist jail in 1937.
I began my blogging experience, hoping to make a difference and create a sea change in mentalities in Canada and beyond. I combine academic, journalistic, and poetic insights as a way to break boundaries. I want to swim outside the narrow terrains of academia, the insular journalistic politics of the right or left, or the cliques of the literary and poetic worlds. Like the anarchists, who insisted that they want neither masters nor followers, I fight for the right of the creative genius to say no to the herd. Society often crushes geniuses. I write to fire the imagination, to inspire, to mould creative genius. The geniuses will save the world with love, poetic intoxication, a longing for social justice, the struggle for fairness and balance, or merely a new perspective.
Now please do not call me an elitist. I will insist that I can learn as much from a taxi driver or garbage collector as a university professor. Our greatest teachers are often outside the walls of our working lives. Our greatest teachers are usually our most difficult adversaries. Yet, if we give prizes to all those that participate in public school contests, valorise political correctness above substantive discussions, or breed conformity in politics, literature, or academia, we sell ourselves short. We kill those individuals that can make Canada grand, bold, expansive.
Grand and bold thinkers are those that are optimistic, open to change, compassionate, visionary, and radically individualistic. They see the greatness and potential of Canada, but also its weaknesses. And they express these truths openly and with equanimity. Henry David Thoreau was bold and visionary because in the 19th century he refused to pay his poll tax to a US government that supported institutionalized slavery. Barack Obama is a visionary because he had the "audacity of hope," the willingness to reach the highest office of his country despite the obstacles associated with a history of anti-black racism. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were visionaries because they harnessed the powers of love and non-violence to free their peoples from the yoke of oppression.
Canada needs its Thoreau, Gandhi, King, or Obama. Are we ready to elect a black prime minister? How about an Arab or a Jew? Are we ready to publish authors that do not say popular, predictable, nice things about Canada? Are we ready to open all our key positions in the state, civil society, or business to the most competent people? Are we ready to support free thinkers that even challenge their own institutions?
Admittedly, we have our Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, our Marshall McLuhan and George Grant, our Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Yet, too much of Canadian politics, academia, journalism, poetry, and music is filled with conformists. Try publishing a non-leftist article in a left-wing newspaper. Or vice versa, although it might oddly be easier to publish left-wing views in a right-wing paper like The National Post. People that are successful in swimming through Canada's institutions play a game and a role with a precise political agenda. These are clever people, but they are not necessarily great thinkers, visionaries, or even people with noble spirits or characters. The time to follow the herd has past. We live in a global village with many models. Let us learn and be open to the world. Let us rise to the challenge of creating free thinkers. It will be fun, democracy will explode, and the culture of mediocrity protected by the strong and weak alike will fade into mist. Are Canadians up to the challenge?
Tamir Bar-On
B is for Bar-On and Beersheba
B is for Bar-On and Beersheba
Today I want to take the opportunity to introduce myself. My last name is Bar-On, as you might have already guessed. I was born in 1967 in the city of Beersheba, in the heart of Israel's Negev desert. We lived on a kibbutz, a utopian socialist agricultural settlement until we moved to Ashdod, an Israeli port town south of Tel-Aviv. It gets so hot in Beersheba in the summer that 45 degrees celsius is not unusual! And I was born on June 23, 1967, shortly after my father participated in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. I can still remember his Che Guevara-like beard that was the cool fashion of the age!
I was born a Bar-On, but my family is Jewish Moroccan and Bar-On is not a Sephardic name (i.e., Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 that found homes largely in the Arab world). My mom was a Mrejen and there are rumours that they might be from Sarajevo. No wonder I get along with people from the Balkans, their zest for life so grand, bold, and explosive! I even played for a local soccer team in Toronto, a Bosnian side called FC Sarajevo. My dad was a Bitton, one of the most common Moroccan Jewish surnames. Perhaps as many as 1 in 10 Israelis have Jewish Moroccan origins. My dad's father, Samuel Bitton, was one of the leading rabbis of Tangiers, the port city made famous by the writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs.
Bitton is a village in England, but I am definitely not English. The name Bitton roughly means "life" or also "house of worship." I was told by my parents that the Hebrew equivalent was Bar-On. Now somehow I always suspected this story. When my parents came to Israel in the early 1960s, Israel was politically, culturally, and economically dominated by European-born Ashkenazi Jews. As my parents came from the Arab world, they were viewed as suspect, less civilized, and all those other nice assumptions that supposedly smart human beings make. A Bar-On sounds more Ashkenazi than a Bitton. So my theory is that my parents saved us the hassle by adopting a surname of the hegemonic Ashkenazi group. But Sephardic I remain, despite my name. And proud of it! Proud that I am swimming between worlds: Jewish, Arab, European. Proud that in my home I grew up with Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish, Ladino, and English. Bring on the cultures and you bring on a multiplicity of ways of seeing and being in this awesome universe!
Beersheba, the city of my birth, is known as the City of Seven Wells. It was a city that was known for being a home to Jews from Arab lands (Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen) and increasingly in the 1990s Ethiopian Jews. When the Partition Plan was proposed by the UN in 1947 (a kind of two-state solution that we often speak about in respect of the current Israel-Palestinian conflict), Beersheba was part of the future Arab state. It was an important strategic centre for the Egyptian army until it was conquered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on October 21, 1948. It has been part of Israel since that day in October. Had Arab politicians decided to accept the Partition Plan, there would be no war and Beersheba might today be in the hands of a Palestinian state. This is the tragedy of history and both Palestinians and Israelis pay a heavy price.
Let me complete this posting by saying that in 1974 my parents took us to Toronto, my new home. I was 7 then and I can still recall how my mother prepared us for the trip by teaching us English. My dad had been in three wars and upward mobility was made difficult for Sephardic Jews in the period (there have been some changes since this period). My parents hoped in the new Israel and loved it with all their hearts, yet understood that we needed to go to a new land called Canada to try our luck. I have only visited Israel once, in 1984, or ten years after we left. I am a dual citizen and love both countries immensely. I see their warts indeed, but I also see the potential of both nations. I call for self-determination for both Palestinians and an assorted collection of Native groups. So long as self-determination works both ways.
When I came to Canada in 1974, there were very few Sephardic Jews in Toronto. The bigger community is in Montreal. I can still remember my mother telling me that Irving Abella, the eminent historian of Jewish history in Canada in the inter-war years, did not know that there were Moroccan Jews in Toronto. The exchange took place at a local Toronto synagogue. A world they have not told you about!
In coming to Toronto, I have found a welcoming home. The entire world is here! The land is cold and people growing up were, at times, inhospitable and reserved. Yet Canadians, as I learned from Canadian intellectual George Grant, are Europeans that are not Europeans. They have charted a unique identity vis-a-vis the United States and Europe that I have come to respect and relish. I sometimes wish we were more bold. That we would celebrate greatness more in the arts, academia, poetry, music, economic and political life. I sometimes wish we would say more and not be afraid of a collision of political views.
Yet, I love that Canada accepts a Bar-On with a funny hyphen (which my parents often made the Scottish Baron for simplicity's sake!) from a desert city called Beersheba. Like Canadians in general, this Bar-On is an amalgamation of cultures. He asks the most of his country. He says let merit ring across the land. Let excellence of performance, credentials, and the aristocracy of the spirit win the day. We are too great a country to settle for second or third best when Canada can be a world leader in people, ideas, national soccer teams, jazz, or literature. Let us all ask better of ourselves and our country. This is what this blessed country has taught me.
Tamir Bar-On
Today I want to take the opportunity to introduce myself. My last name is Bar-On, as you might have already guessed. I was born in 1967 in the city of Beersheba, in the heart of Israel's Negev desert. We lived on a kibbutz, a utopian socialist agricultural settlement until we moved to Ashdod, an Israeli port town south of Tel-Aviv. It gets so hot in Beersheba in the summer that 45 degrees celsius is not unusual! And I was born on June 23, 1967, shortly after my father participated in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. I can still remember his Che Guevara-like beard that was the cool fashion of the age!
I was born a Bar-On, but my family is Jewish Moroccan and Bar-On is not a Sephardic name (i.e., Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 that found homes largely in the Arab world). My mom was a Mrejen and there are rumours that they might be from Sarajevo. No wonder I get along with people from the Balkans, their zest for life so grand, bold, and explosive! I even played for a local soccer team in Toronto, a Bosnian side called FC Sarajevo. My dad was a Bitton, one of the most common Moroccan Jewish surnames. Perhaps as many as 1 in 10 Israelis have Jewish Moroccan origins. My dad's father, Samuel Bitton, was one of the leading rabbis of Tangiers, the port city made famous by the writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs.
Bitton is a village in England, but I am definitely not English. The name Bitton roughly means "life" or also "house of worship." I was told by my parents that the Hebrew equivalent was Bar-On. Now somehow I always suspected this story. When my parents came to Israel in the early 1960s, Israel was politically, culturally, and economically dominated by European-born Ashkenazi Jews. As my parents came from the Arab world, they were viewed as suspect, less civilized, and all those other nice assumptions that supposedly smart human beings make. A Bar-On sounds more Ashkenazi than a Bitton. So my theory is that my parents saved us the hassle by adopting a surname of the hegemonic Ashkenazi group. But Sephardic I remain, despite my name. And proud of it! Proud that I am swimming between worlds: Jewish, Arab, European. Proud that in my home I grew up with Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish, Ladino, and English. Bring on the cultures and you bring on a multiplicity of ways of seeing and being in this awesome universe!
Beersheba, the city of my birth, is known as the City of Seven Wells. It was a city that was known for being a home to Jews from Arab lands (Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen) and increasingly in the 1990s Ethiopian Jews. When the Partition Plan was proposed by the UN in 1947 (a kind of two-state solution that we often speak about in respect of the current Israel-Palestinian conflict), Beersheba was part of the future Arab state. It was an important strategic centre for the Egyptian army until it was conquered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on October 21, 1948. It has been part of Israel since that day in October. Had Arab politicians decided to accept the Partition Plan, there would be no war and Beersheba might today be in the hands of a Palestinian state. This is the tragedy of history and both Palestinians and Israelis pay a heavy price.
Let me complete this posting by saying that in 1974 my parents took us to Toronto, my new home. I was 7 then and I can still recall how my mother prepared us for the trip by teaching us English. My dad had been in three wars and upward mobility was made difficult for Sephardic Jews in the period (there have been some changes since this period). My parents hoped in the new Israel and loved it with all their hearts, yet understood that we needed to go to a new land called Canada to try our luck. I have only visited Israel once, in 1984, or ten years after we left. I am a dual citizen and love both countries immensely. I see their warts indeed, but I also see the potential of both nations. I call for self-determination for both Palestinians and an assorted collection of Native groups. So long as self-determination works both ways.
When I came to Canada in 1974, there were very few Sephardic Jews in Toronto. The bigger community is in Montreal. I can still remember my mother telling me that Irving Abella, the eminent historian of Jewish history in Canada in the inter-war years, did not know that there were Moroccan Jews in Toronto. The exchange took place at a local Toronto synagogue. A world they have not told you about!
In coming to Toronto, I have found a welcoming home. The entire world is here! The land is cold and people growing up were, at times, inhospitable and reserved. Yet Canadians, as I learned from Canadian intellectual George Grant, are Europeans that are not Europeans. They have charted a unique identity vis-a-vis the United States and Europe that I have come to respect and relish. I sometimes wish we were more bold. That we would celebrate greatness more in the arts, academia, poetry, music, economic and political life. I sometimes wish we would say more and not be afraid of a collision of political views.
Yet, I love that Canada accepts a Bar-On with a funny hyphen (which my parents often made the Scottish Baron for simplicity's sake!) from a desert city called Beersheba. Like Canadians in general, this Bar-On is an amalgamation of cultures. He asks the most of his country. He says let merit ring across the land. Let excellence of performance, credentials, and the aristocracy of the spirit win the day. We are too great a country to settle for second or third best when Canada can be a world leader in people, ideas, national soccer teams, jazz, or literature. Let us all ask better of ourselves and our country. This is what this blessed country has taught me.
Tamir Bar-On
Monday, April 20, 2009
A is for Alhambra and Ahmadinejad
Beginning today I will make daily posts about academia, journalism, poetry, and worlds they have not told you about! I start with the letter A and end with the letter Z (Zed for us Canadians and Zee for our good friends south of the border!). This will take approximately one month.
A is for Alhambra and Ahmadinejad
I know you might wonder. How can you put the genocidal President of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the Alhambra, the architectural marvel known as "the red fortress" built by Muslim rulers in 14th century Granada? The Alhambra is so revered as a cultural treasure that it is a UNESCO world heritage site. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is so reviled for sending child soldiers to die during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), calls to wipe out Israel, sponsoring of Islamists Hezbollah and Hamas that seek to liquidate the "Zionist entity," and grotesque role in killing 85 at a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994. The good news is that the world is starting to wake up to the danger posed by a nuclear Iran bent on a fundamentalist Islam that wants to cleanse the planet of Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims, Sunnis, and all those that call for democracy (which is predictably seen as a Zionist plot to destroy the Islamic world).
Today Ahmadinejad used the UN's second conference on racism to specifically call Israel "the most cruel and racist regime." Jewish suffering for the Holocaust, which the Iranian dictator likes to deny, led to European guilt, Palestinian statelessness, and the creation of an imperialist, racist "alien body" (Israel). Forget that Israel has Israeli Arab parliamentarians, professors like myself, and footballers. Or Jews and Arabs peacefully living in the same neighbourhoods. Forget that nearly 20 per cent of Israel is composed of Israeli Arab citizens. Forget too that Jews can no longer live in Iran. Or most of the Muslim world because of genocidal anti-Semitism that has a spiritual kinship to Nazism: the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and beyond, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Forget that genocides come and go in Darfur (Sudan), Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq, as the UN repeatedly and disproportionately singles out Israel as the most heinous regime on the planet.
Palestinian statelessness is a real problem. Like the prince from Hawaii, Obama, I favour two states for two peoples - what Israeli writer Amos Oz would call an adult "divorce. We do, however, live in dark days on that goal of two states. The so-called "progressive" left eats up the anti-Zionism, as do the anti-Semites on the right by disingenuously positing that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Did anyone ask the opinions of real flesh and blood Jews what they think? Do they care?
Israel, the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Australia took the lead by refusing to attend the UN's second racism conference. The irony of all ironies: An anti-racism conference that degenerates into racism and anti-Semitism against Jews and the collective Jew (Israel), as Canadian Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has pointed out. The first Durban conference on racism in 2001 was also a farcical affair, but one with real consequences for Jews in Israel and beyond: Rising anti-Semitism from Paris to Caracas. The real aim of such a conference is not anti-racism, or a solution to the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian and Israel-Arab conflicts. Rather the aims are division, racial hatred, and the denigration of Israel to the point where it becomes obvious to those that know nothing about the conflict that Israel ought not to exist. Jews ought not to have a right to self-determination period.
Finally we had more massive walkouts during Ahmadinejad's speech today, including Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic, and France. His speech might have been lifted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the vile 19th century hoax created by the Czarist authorities to fire mass popular anti-Semitism. The same Protocols of the Elders of Zion that I saw openly distributed in London and played to capacity television audiences in Egypt.
The left from Canada to Britain and France to Australia liked for years to explain away Ahmadinejad as a madman, but a madman fighting the good anti-imperialist fight. A Che Guevara of our times in Islamist ideological clothes. Could it be that the world is waking up? Could it be that we might be getting better at assessing our foes? Will we wake up to find out that the imperialist secularists we so hated might not be great, but better than the Islamist, Chinese, or Russian alternatives? Are we realizing that if Israel goes the chances for democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds will be sent back centuries?
I began the blog by juxtaposing the Alhambra and Ahmadinejad. Muslims lost the Alhambra in 1492, the year Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain. My Jewish Moroccan ancestors originate from Muslim Spain. My mother speaks Arabic and my father Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken by the Jews of Spain. I am both an Israeli and Canadian citizen. I live the worlds of bridges: Berber, Arab-Islamic, Jewish, and Christian European cultures. I know that coexistence is possible between peoples because I am a product of that coexistence that gives life its richness, diversity, and spiritual meaning. Yet, we cannot recreate the exact conditions of a Muslim Spanish Golden Age of the Middle Ages. Jews want their own state and have it in Israel. They have solid historical reasons for wanting such a state. They do not merely want tolerated, minority, “people of the Book” status.
On the other hand, Arabs and Muslims were great players in Middle Eastern and world history. The Ottoman Empire only died after some 500 years in the early 20th century. An Ahmadinejad or bin Laden want to restore the ancient glories of Islamic empires lost. A Jewish state in the heart of the Middle East is a reminder, a daily reminder, of what Arabs and Muslims were and what they are today. They are peoples breathing the pains of countless defeats. So they will continue their fight.
The good news is that by walking out on the Iranian dictator at the UN perhaps the world is waking up. They are waking up to the reality that Ahmadinejad and his allies from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Lebanon to Gaza are not our friends. When they will triumph, there will be no gentleness. There will be no good night. It will be lights out on democracy, parliamentarism, rule of law, pluralism of the press and political parties, secularism, and women's rights. And the entire world will lose the positive heritage of the Enlightenment.
Tamir Bar-On
A is for Alhambra and Ahmadinejad
I know you might wonder. How can you put the genocidal President of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the Alhambra, the architectural marvel known as "the red fortress" built by Muslim rulers in 14th century Granada? The Alhambra is so revered as a cultural treasure that it is a UNESCO world heritage site. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is so reviled for sending child soldiers to die during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), calls to wipe out Israel, sponsoring of Islamists Hezbollah and Hamas that seek to liquidate the "Zionist entity," and grotesque role in killing 85 at a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994. The good news is that the world is starting to wake up to the danger posed by a nuclear Iran bent on a fundamentalist Islam that wants to cleanse the planet of Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims, Sunnis, and all those that call for democracy (which is predictably seen as a Zionist plot to destroy the Islamic world).
Today Ahmadinejad used the UN's second conference on racism to specifically call Israel "the most cruel and racist regime." Jewish suffering for the Holocaust, which the Iranian dictator likes to deny, led to European guilt, Palestinian statelessness, and the creation of an imperialist, racist "alien body" (Israel). Forget that Israel has Israeli Arab parliamentarians, professors like myself, and footballers. Or Jews and Arabs peacefully living in the same neighbourhoods. Forget that nearly 20 per cent of Israel is composed of Israeli Arab citizens. Forget too that Jews can no longer live in Iran. Or most of the Muslim world because of genocidal anti-Semitism that has a spiritual kinship to Nazism: the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and beyond, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Forget that genocides come and go in Darfur (Sudan), Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq, as the UN repeatedly and disproportionately singles out Israel as the most heinous regime on the planet.
Palestinian statelessness is a real problem. Like the prince from Hawaii, Obama, I favour two states for two peoples - what Israeli writer Amos Oz would call an adult "divorce. We do, however, live in dark days on that goal of two states. The so-called "progressive" left eats up the anti-Zionism, as do the anti-Semites on the right by disingenuously positing that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Did anyone ask the opinions of real flesh and blood Jews what they think? Do they care?
Israel, the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Australia took the lead by refusing to attend the UN's second racism conference. The irony of all ironies: An anti-racism conference that degenerates into racism and anti-Semitism against Jews and the collective Jew (Israel), as Canadian Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has pointed out. The first Durban conference on racism in 2001 was also a farcical affair, but one with real consequences for Jews in Israel and beyond: Rising anti-Semitism from Paris to Caracas. The real aim of such a conference is not anti-racism, or a solution to the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian and Israel-Arab conflicts. Rather the aims are division, racial hatred, and the denigration of Israel to the point where it becomes obvious to those that know nothing about the conflict that Israel ought not to exist. Jews ought not to have a right to self-determination period.
Finally we had more massive walkouts during Ahmadinejad's speech today, including Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic, and France. His speech might have been lifted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the vile 19th century hoax created by the Czarist authorities to fire mass popular anti-Semitism. The same Protocols of the Elders of Zion that I saw openly distributed in London and played to capacity television audiences in Egypt.
The left from Canada to Britain and France to Australia liked for years to explain away Ahmadinejad as a madman, but a madman fighting the good anti-imperialist fight. A Che Guevara of our times in Islamist ideological clothes. Could it be that the world is waking up? Could it be that we might be getting better at assessing our foes? Will we wake up to find out that the imperialist secularists we so hated might not be great, but better than the Islamist, Chinese, or Russian alternatives? Are we realizing that if Israel goes the chances for democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds will be sent back centuries?
I began the blog by juxtaposing the Alhambra and Ahmadinejad. Muslims lost the Alhambra in 1492, the year Muslims and Jews were expelled from Spain. My Jewish Moroccan ancestors originate from Muslim Spain. My mother speaks Arabic and my father Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken by the Jews of Spain. I am both an Israeli and Canadian citizen. I live the worlds of bridges: Berber, Arab-Islamic, Jewish, and Christian European cultures. I know that coexistence is possible between peoples because I am a product of that coexistence that gives life its richness, diversity, and spiritual meaning. Yet, we cannot recreate the exact conditions of a Muslim Spanish Golden Age of the Middle Ages. Jews want their own state and have it in Israel. They have solid historical reasons for wanting such a state. They do not merely want tolerated, minority, “people of the Book” status.
On the other hand, Arabs and Muslims were great players in Middle Eastern and world history. The Ottoman Empire only died after some 500 years in the early 20th century. An Ahmadinejad or bin Laden want to restore the ancient glories of Islamic empires lost. A Jewish state in the heart of the Middle East is a reminder, a daily reminder, of what Arabs and Muslims were and what they are today. They are peoples breathing the pains of countless defeats. So they will continue their fight.
The good news is that by walking out on the Iranian dictator at the UN perhaps the world is waking up. They are waking up to the reality that Ahmadinejad and his allies from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Lebanon to Gaza are not our friends. When they will triumph, there will be no gentleness. There will be no good night. It will be lights out on democracy, parliamentarism, rule of law, pluralism of the press and political parties, secularism, and women's rights. And the entire world will lose the positive heritage of the Enlightenment.
Tamir Bar-On
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Big and Strong as a Palm Tree
The Afro-futurist jazz guru Sun Ra (1914-1993) once remarked that "There are other worlds they have not told you about!" With the spirit of Sun Ra in mind, I begin my blogging experience. Get ready for a jazzy voyage in many directions!
I am a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada). My name in Hebrew means "big and strong as a palm tree." I reside in Toronto, one of the truly great multicultural cities of the planet. I am a Toronto Footbal Club (FC) fan! I played varsity soccer for The McGill Redmen for three seasons back in the 1990s! Like Albert Camus, I insist that football (soccer) taught me lots that I know about morals and obligations in life. I am also the author of Where Have All The Fascists Gone?(Ashgate, 2007).
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9690&edition_id=10650
I am working on a second book, Modernism and the European New Right (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011). Both works explore the attempt of neo-fascist intellectuals in Western Europe after 1968 to revitalize fascist thought in the age after the official defeats of Nazism and Fascism in 1945. The second more precisely examines the views of modernity of European New Right intellectuals, which have been accused by liberal and left-wing critics of recreating a "fascism with a human face."
Although I graduated with a Ph.D. from Montreal's McGill University, I am no traditional intellectual. I also write journalistic articles and poetry. Writing in different realms allows me to connect with different parts of my soul. I also want to have a positive impact on the world beyond the walls of the academy. I have recently published a critique of Israeli Apartheid Week in The National Post with the aim of finding a just two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/02/26/tamir-bar-on-the-manipulative-mythology-of-israeli-apartheid.aspx
As a result of this article, the Dave Rutherford Show in Calgary interviewed me for 20 minutes on March 6, 2009. My poem "Exile" will be published shortly in The Toronto Quarterly (no. 3).
Exile
They say that exile ended in 1948,
The birth of the state,
The springtime of its hopes.
Now we in the diaspora
Wandering in the desert for forty years,
Wondering when it will end?
But should I return,
Would I not again be an exile in my own land?
Would I not long for the dream palaces of Granada,
Or the azure-domed synagogue at Kensington Market?
Would I not lament what the state had become,
The new exiles in our midst caught by barbed wires?
Exile is deep pain like being pulled from the roots of an ancient tree.
Exile is the exodus of freedom.
(Tamir Bar-On, The Toronto Quarterly, 3, 2009)
In Big and Strong as a Palm Tree, I will offer you my academic, journalistic, and poetic writings. Moreover, I will hopefully tell the stories that are not told by our mainstream media outlets. Too often we sell ourselves short in liberal democracies by not asking for a more robust, vibrant exchange of ideas between political foes. I happen to believe that a good newspaper or Internet site is one that does not slavishly follow a dogma, but asks hard questions and makes competent arguments. I relish debates, even with my political opponents. I hope to engender critical skills training in readers by asking tough questions of all political movements on the right, left, or beyond.
I also happen to believe that we can grow spiritually as a human species. That we must heal the world, even as we see it decaying. That love can be more powerful than hate. That a clash of civilizations is not inevitable. That we can help build bridges between friends, lovers, communities, workers, classes, nations, cultures, religions, men and women, believers and so-called unbelievers, city and countryside, gay and straight people, Jews and Arabs, and hundreds of other divisions.
I do hope that this blog, in its small way, helps inch us forward to a new consciousness. This consciousness can lead us towards a more open exchange of ideas, the flowering of democracy here and beyond, and genuine peace and social justice. Like Dostoyevsky, we must understand that no political cause can ultimately legitimize the anguished cries of one suffering child. And like modern Greens, I would argue that our technological, capitalist civilization cannot sustain itself. We must start to slow down if the planet is to survive. If we would like to create more sustainable human relationships, we must supersede a mercantile mentality and its attendant institutions. Marxism might have died in its crude permutations, but the questions it posed about social injustice will always remain. No civilized political society can neglect the dignity of free thinkers.
Tamir Bar-On
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