Topic(s): Guantanamo Bay
Date Posted: 05.21.09

Published on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Guantanamo: A Prison Built On Lies
by Andy Worthington
As the Obama administration prepares to relaunch Dick Cheney and David Addington's reviled Military Commissions (with claims that they will be used for less than 20 of the 240 prisoners still held), senior officials have been largely silent about the eventual fate of the rest of the prison's population, with the exception of a few recent remarks indicating that they are also thinking of pressing for a form of "preventive detention" for 50 to 100 of the prisoners.

The irony -- that all the prisoners have been enduring a form of "preventive detention" for over seven years -- is apparently lost on the government, which has also maintained a resolute silence in response to a handful of habeas corpus cases (in which the prisoners are seeking to have their cases dismissed by the courts, as mandated by the Supreme Court last June) that have resulted in judges pouring scorn on the government's supposed evidence.

In an article last week, I analyzed a devastating ruling by District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in the habeas corpus hearing of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. A Yemeni, Ali Ahmed has always maintained that he was a student, staying in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and that, when he was seized in a raid on the house, on March 28, 2002, he had no knowledge that the house was, apparently, tangentially connected to the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Furthermore, in response to the government's other allegations, he has also "denie[d] ever going to Afghanistan, training at an al-Qaeda camp, fighting against anyone, or being a member of a terrorist group."

Authorizing Ali Ahmed's habeas claim, Judge Kessler demolished the government's case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a "mosaic" of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

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Topic(s): Camp
Date Posted: 05.21.09

Quarter of a Million Sri Lankans Face Two Years in Camps

Government is unrepentant about squalid conditions, saying Tamil Tigers must be weeded out from amongst civilians
by Gethin Chamberlain in Colombo
Many of the quarter of a million people held in internment camps in Sri Lanka face up to two years behind razor wire, a government official said today.

A displaced Tamil woman and her baby at a camp in Vavuniya district.
(Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images)The official from the defence ministry said Sri Lanka was not prepared to let the UN dictate terms over the length of time people could be held in the camps.

A UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, said he was "shocked" at the revelation, which ran counter to previous government assurances.

"It was our understanding that the government was to return 80% of the people to their homes by the end of the year, or at least try to," he said.

The UN, Britain and human rights groups have been pressing the government in Colombo to release people from the camps as soon as possible.

The news came as the Red Cross suspended delivery of supplies to displaced civilians after the Sri Lankan government blocked access to camps it controls in the country's north.

"There is no access to these camps at this particular moment," said a Red Cross official in Geneva amid growing alarm about the plight of tens of thousands of Sri Lankans who arrived at the government-run camps with little more than the clothes on their backs.

The UNHCR refugee agency said: "Restrictions to enter the IDP [internally displaced people] sites imposed by the authorities over the weekend are hindering UNHCR's ability to deliver assistance to the IDP sites (a vast area spanning 4,000 acres [1,600 hectares]) in the district of Vavuniya, where a majority of the displaced population has been accommodated. This has undoubtedly hindered our ability to deliver assistance to the population in need."

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Topic(s): Academic Freedom?
Date Posted: 05.18.09

Somehow when I read this line my jaw dropped:
"But there are signs of creative thinking among educators as well as in government—and some suggestions that barriers to educational opportunity must come down as a matter of national interest."
One such example, is cutting the number of years of college from 4 to 3 in the name of giving equal opportunity. The universities' troubles are not the results of the financial crisis, nor bad spending. This so-called pragmatic orientation is not dissimilar from the federal reserve believing that the management of the availability of funds and rate of interest can determine the fate of an economy. The troubles are based on the economic outlook itself. The troubles are based on the idea that it is question of government, of ordering and administration. If the University has a problem today, it is not dissimilar to the problems in health care in America. They are run like for profit industries / corporations and they are so far from their original purpose that they need to be completely overhauled. -rg

Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
The Universities in Trouble

By Andrew Delbanco

From The New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22673

Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment
by David F. Swensen
Free Press, 408 pp., $35.00

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
by Peter Sacks
University of California Press, 376 pp., $24.95

Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites
by Mitchell L. Stevens
Harvard University Press, 308 pp., $25.95

Fulfilling the Commitment: Recommendations for Reforming Federal Student Aid in Brief
by Sandy Baum, Michael McPherson, and others
Spencer Foundation/College Board/Lumina Foundation for Education, September 2008, available at www.collegeboard.com

Trends in College Spending: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go?
by Jane V. Wellman and others

Delta Cost Project/ Lumina Foundation for Education, January 2009, available at www.deltacostproject.org

1.

Since the financial meltdown began to accelerate last summer, the world has changed utterly for colleges and universities just as it has for everyone who had not been stashing cash under the mattress. Along with failing banks, auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, universities have been making headlines—especially those whose gigantic endowments (Harvard's was approaching $40 billion before the crash) have sharply declined. Last year, politicians and pundits were complaining about the unseemly wealth of such institutions. This year, alumni are getting e-mails from beleaguered presidents assuring them that Alma Mater will somehow ride out the storm.

The headlines tend to focus on the collapse of institutional investments, which, indeed, has been spectacular. No one quite knows how much has been lost. Led by the example of Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, whose Pioneering Portfolio Management is described by the chair of the Yale investment committee as "the best book ever written on managing institutional investment portfolios," endowment managers had been shifting large sums toward illiquid assets such as private equity partnerships, which typically require periodic infusions of fresh capital, and whose current market value is virtually impossible to assess. This and other versions of "an unconventional approach to institutional investment" (the subtitle of Swensen's book, first published in 2000 and recently reissued in revised form) worked very well during the boom years, bringing home double-digit returns.

Today, leading universities are reporting endowment losses of 20 percent or more, but some informed observers think that the true figure, at least in some cases, may be closer to 50 percent. Actions that would never have been contemplated a year ago, such as selling severely depreciated assets in order to meet cash obligations or issuing bonds at punitive interest rates, are no longer unheard of. And in the current market, would-be sellers and borrowers are finding few buyers or lenders.[1]

What does the financial turmoil really mean for America's colleges and universities? It depends on whom you ask and which institution you are asking about. Trustees generally limit spending from the endowment to under 5 percent of its value, calculated as a three-year trailing average, which means that at colleges where endowment income is an important source of operating revenue, the decline in asset valuation will suppress available funds for several years even if markets recover sooner than expected. Harvard, for instance, covers more than a third of its $3.5 billion annual operating budget from its endowment, and is therefore facing deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since most American colleges have an endowment less than 1 percent the size of Harvard's, most do not have Harvard's problem. But they have other problems. The sources of income on which they depend—tuition revenue (at private colleges) and state appropriations (at public colleges), as well as annual alumni contributions (at both)—are under pressure too. Everyone knows about the competitive frenzy to get into a few highly ranked colleges, but in fact most of the 1,500 private colleges in the United States do not attract significantly more applicants than they can enroll. On the contrary, they struggle to meet enrollment targets, especially now that families in economic distress are turning to public institutions, which tend to be cheaper.[2]

he prevailing financial model at private colleges is one by which relatively affluent students pay more than needy students, although even those who pay full "sticker price" (roughly $50,000 per year at a top-tier school) meet less than two thirds of the full cost of their own education—calculated as a proportional fraction of faculty and staff salaries, dormitory accommodations, dining, library, health, and athletic services, as well as overhead costs such as keeping the lights on, the heat flowing, and the buildings in good repair. In other words, all students in America's private colleges—except for those at institutions run for profit, such as the University of Phoenix—are subsidized to one extent or another.

Since the crash, it has become harder to provide the subsidy—and at just the moment when many students need more. The financial need of both enrolled and prospective students is rising as parents lose their jobs and watch the value of their homes drop, leaving them ineligible for home equity loans, which, until recently, were a common instrument for financing their children's education. At Syracuse University, for example, the number of students appealing for additional aid has risen by nearly one third compared to the same period last year. At many private colleges there is pressure to enroll more students who can pay at least a substantial fraction of full tuition and fees, and fewer who depend heavily on financial aid.[3]

Meanwhile, at public institutions, where tuition historically has been kept relatively low by means of a subsidy derived from tax revenue, the financial model is also at risk. These institutions—long before the current crisis—were seeing what Peter Sacks, in an indignant and informative book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, calls "massive disinvestment" by the states. The University of Virginia now receives a mere 8 percent of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30 percent a quarter-century ago. At the University of Wisconsin, in a state with a long progressive tradition, only about 19 percent comes from public funds—also down from around 30 percent just a decade ago. To make up for the decline in public money, tuition rates at public universities have been climbing even faster than at private institutions—a trend likely to accelerate, at least in the short run.[4]

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Topic(s): Agamben
Date Posted: 05.17.09

This is a transcript of a talk by Jason Michael Adams. For those who would like the audio: http://www.zoepolitics.com/agamben.mp3

Giorgio Agamben

I have for my lecture a bilingual title. First the French title, 'Quel Est Dispositif?' Then, an attempt at an English translation, 'What is a Dispositor?' Let me start with some considerations on this title. Of course the term 'dispositif' comes from Michel Foucault, that is to say, when he begins to work on what he will call governmentality. For reasons that I hope will become clear in my lecture, I am not satisfied with the current English translation of the term dispositif as 'procedure' or 'apparatus' and I would prefer to keep nearer to the French original. This is why I have proposed what is probably a monstrous translation, as 'dispositor'. The term is in the English Oxford Dictionary, it is an astrological term that means the law of a sign in its relation to other planets. Thus a dispositor as the law of the astrological sign embodies all of the forces and influences that the planet exerts on individuals, inclining them, binding them and restraining them in all possible ways. The questions of terminology are important in philosophy. Even if we do not reduce philosophy to terminology like Friedrich Schlegel proposes to do, terminology is extremely important. As a philosopher whom I respect very much used to say, terminology is the poetic moment in philosophy. Of course philosophers do not need to define their technical terms. Thus Plato does not define his most important technical term 'idea', that is why they have spent 2,000 years discussing it. On the contrary, Spinoza prefers to define 'geometrical', 'substantive', 'casa sui', etc, and Leibniz also. Every part of the discourse can become a technical term, so that the hyphen in Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein is the technical term. And an adverb, gleichwol in Kant is a technical term. And in the last text published by Deleuze, the dots are technical terms.

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Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 05.17.09

new left review 49 jan feb 2008 29

Alain Badiou

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France

in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s victory.1 It is often said that

unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones some-

times prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly

dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the

opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the

race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or

a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly

have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to

come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath

of May 2007. Something else was at stake—some complex of factors for

which ‘Sarkozy’ is merely a name. How should it be understood?

An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the mani-

fest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within

the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive man-

ner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes

any embodiments of dissenting political will. A second component of

the left’s depressive disorientation after May 2007 was an overwhelming

bout of historical nostalgia. The political order that emerged from World

War Two in France—with its unambiguous referents of ‘left’ and ‘right’,

and its consensus, shared by Gaullists and Communists alike, on the

balance-sheet of the Occupation, Resistance and Liberation—has now

collapsed. This is one reason for Sarkozy’s ostentatious dinners, yacht-

ing holidays and so on—a way of saying that the left no longer frightens

anyone: Vivent les riches, and to hell with the poor. Understandably, this

may fill the sincere souls of the left with nostalgia for the good old days—

Mitterrand, De Gaulle, Marchais, even Chirac, Gaullism’s Brezhnev, who

knew that to do nothing was the easiest way to let the system die.

Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over

which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been antici-

pated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still

more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round).

The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a

matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the

actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent

scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the

entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orienta-

tion itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting

disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take

up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing

his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers.

The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all

accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so

forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?

A third component of the contemporary disorientation arose from the

outcome of the electoral conflict itself. I have characterized the 2007

presidential elections—pitting Sarkozy against Royal—as the clash of

two types of fear. The first is the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that

their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of

foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans.

Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even

one who oppresses and impoverishes you further. The current embodi-

ment of this figure is, of course, the over-stimulated police chief: Sarkozy.

In electoral terms, this is contested not by a resounding affirmation of

self-determining heterogeneity, but by the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of

the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows

nor likes. This ‘fear of the fear’ is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose

content—beyond the sentiment itself—is barely detectable; the Royal

camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed;

the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear. For

both sides, a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan

(where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming

with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives

on these issues was on neither party’s agenda.

1

This is an edited extract from De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances, 4,

Nouvelles Editions Lignes, Paris 2007; to be published in English by Verso as What

Do We Mean When We Say ‘Sarkozy’? in 2008.

badiou: After Sarkozy 31

The conflict between the primary fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ was set-

tled in favour of the former. There was a visceral reflex in play here, very

apparent in the faces of those partying over Sarkozy’s victory. For those

in the grip of the ‘fear of the fear’ there was a corresponding negative

reflex, flinching from the result: this was the third component of 2007’s

depressive disorientation. We should not underestimate the role of what

Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through

the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv

and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments.

Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of

the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary

‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after

all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at

the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from real-

ity. The vacuity of this position manifested itself perfectly in the empty

exaltations of Ségolène Royal.

Electoralism and the state

If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by cer-

tain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility

which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would

have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apoliti-

cal procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal

imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of

political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my

fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in

itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive

per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form,

that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of

the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function.

This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have

no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what

way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics.

If the electoral mechanism is not a political but a state procedure, what

does it achieve? Drawing on the lessons of 2007, one effect is to incor-

porate both the fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ into the state—to invest

the state with these mass-subjective elements, the better to legitimate

it as an object of fear in its own right, equipped for terror and coercion.

For the world horizon of democracy is increasingly defined by war. The

West is engaged on an expanding number of fronts: the maintenance of

the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military

component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sus-

tained by force. This creates a particular dialectic of war and fear. Our

governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect

us from it at home. If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists

in Afghanistan or Chechnya, they will come over here to organize the

resentful rabble outcasts.

Strategic neo-Pétainism

In France, this alliance of fear and war has classically gone by the

name of Pétainism. The mass ideology of Pétainism—responsible for

its widespread success between 1940 and 1944—rested in part on the

fear generated by the First World War: Marshal Pétain would protect

France from the disastrous effects of the Second, by keeping well out

of it. In the Marshal’s own words, it was necessary to be more afraid of

war than of defeat. The vast majority of the French accepted the rela-

tive tranquillity of a consensual defeat and most got off fairly lightly

during the War, compared to the Russians or even the English. The

analogous project today is based on the belief that the French need sim-

ply to accept the laws of the us-led world model and all will be well:

France will be protected from the disastrous effects of war and global

disparity. This form of neo-Pétainism as a mass ideology is effectively

on offer from both parties today. In what follows, I will argue that it is

a key analytical element in understanding the disorientation that goes

by the name of ‘Sarkozy’; to grasp the latter in its overall dimension, its

historicity and intelligibility, requires us to go back to what I will call its

Pétainist ‘transcendental’.2

I am not saying, of course, that circumstances today resemble the

defeat of 1940, or that Sarkozy resembles Pétain. The point is a more

formal one: that the unconscious national-historical roots of that which

goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configu-

ration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the

2

See my Logiques des mondes, Paris 2006 for a full development of the concept of

‘transcendentals’ and their function, which is to govern the order of appearance of

multiplicities within a world.

summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This

matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the

Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly sup-

ported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’

baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population,

that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat

once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real

content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the

‘nation’, yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt

of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself,

an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment

of national rebirth.

Numerous aspects of this neo-Pétainist tradition are in evidence today.

Typically, capitulation and servility are presented as invention and regen-

eration. These were central themes of Sarkozy’s campaign: the Mayor of

Neuilly would transform the French economy and put the country back

to work. The real content, of course, is a politics of continuous obedi-

ence to the demands of high finance, in the name of national renewal. A

second characteristic is that of decline and ‘moral crisis’, which justifies

the repressive measures taken in the name of regeneration. Morality is

invoked, as so often, in place of politics and against any popular mobi-

lization. Appeal is made instead to the virtues of hard work, discipline,

the family: ‘merit should be rewarded’. This typical displacement of poli-

tics by morality has been prepared, from the 1970s ‘new philosophers’

onwards, by all who have laboured to ‘moralize’ historical judgement.

The object is in reality political: to maintain that national decline has

nothing to do with the high servants of capital but is the fault of certain

ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers

and young people from the banlieue.

A third characteristic of neo-Pétainism is the paradigmatic function

of foreign experience. The example of correction always comes from

abroad, from countries that have long overcome their moral crises. For

Pétain, the shining examples were Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany

and Franco’s Spain: leaders who had put their countries back on their

feet. The political aesthetic is that of imitation: like Plato’s demiurge, the

state must shape society with its eyes fixed on foreign models. Today, of

course, the examples are Bush’s America and Blair’s Britain.

A fourth characteristic is the notion that the source of the current cri-

sis lies in a disastrous past event. For the proto-Pétainism of the 1815

Restoration, this was of course the Revolution and the beheading of the

King. For Pétain himself in 1940 it was the Popular Front, the Blum

government and above all the great strikes and factory occupations of

1936. The possessing classes far preferred the German Occupation to

the fear which these disorders had provoked. For Sarkozy, the evils of

May 68—forty years ago—have been constantly invoked as the cause

of the current ‘crisis of values’. Neo-Pétainism provides a usefully sim-

plified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a

working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military

or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and

2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy gov-

ernment, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction

needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the

element of racism. Under Pétain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of

the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: ‘we are not an

inferior race’—the implication being, ‘unlike others’; ‘the true French

need not doubt the legitimacy of their country’s actions’—in Algeria

and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the

disorientation that goes by the name of ‘Sarkozy’ may be analysed as the

latest manifestation of the Pétainist transcendental.

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Topic(s): urban "development"
Date Posted: 05.17.09

This has been up on Generation Online for a while. But was re-reading it in light of so many discussions about the city, neoliberalism, and questions of public/private space. Thought it is interesting to link to. -rg

Metropolis

Giorgio Agamben*

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: ‘Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist’. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however ‘pure’, general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won’t enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.


I would like to start from a banal consideration on the etymology of the word metropolis. As you know, in Greek metropolis means Mother City and refers to the relationship between cities and colonies. The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis(1). As you know this meaning of the word is still current and today used to express the relationship of the metropolitan territory of the home to the colonies. The first instructive observation suggested by the etymology is that the word metropolis has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dishomogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. And this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as a urban, continuum and relatively homogeneous fabric (2). This is the first consideraton: the isonomy that defines the Greek polis as a model of political city is excluded from the relation between metropolis and colony, and therefore the term metropolis, when transposed to describe a urban fabric, carries this fundamental dishomogeneity with it. So I propose that we keep the term metropolis for something substantially other from the city, in the traditional conception of the polis, i.e. something politically and spatially isonomic. I suggest to use this term, metropolis, to designate the new urban fabric that emerges in parallel with the processes of transformation that Michel Foucault defined as the shift from the territorial power of the ancient regime, of sovereignty, to modern biopower, that is in its essence governmental.

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Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 05.16.09

Macleans.ca

The haunting tale of an Armenian Genocide survivor

Susan Mohammad
May 15, 2009

Q&A with Peter Balakian, who translated his great great uncle's memoir
of deportation, massacre and escape

Tags: Armenian genocide, Grigoris Balakian, Peter Balakian

Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 was
written by Bishop Grigoris Balakian, a survivor of the Armenian
Genocide. Balakian was arrested along with other Armenian
intellectuals and political leaders on April 24, 1915 (now the
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day), but was able to shepherd a small
group of deportees he fought to keep alive by bribing Turkish
officials during their four-year march toward the desert of Northern
Syria - many of his countrymen didn't survive the journey, dying of
exposure, starvation, disease while other Armenians has been raped or
killed by Turkish killing squads. After Balakian escaped he wrote
about his agonizing journey chronicling the Armenian Genocide in
painful detail. Decades later, the text was translated into English
over a 10-year span by his great great nephew, author Peter Balakian,
who sat down with Maclean's to talk about the book.

Q: How did you come to find your great uncle's diaries on surviving
the genocide?

A: My great uncle was always a mythic figure in the family lore, but
he was only known as a bishop. Nobody ever spoke about him as a
survivor of genocide or a writer of a major memoir. That was very
hushed up which struck me as very odd because I come from a
professional literary family, and thought that my aunts might have
mentioned he wrote these books. But nobody wanted to go there because
it was too traumatic and that past was never talked about openly. So
when I learned about my great great uncle from a French newspaper
article that somebody had sent me, I read about these memoirs he had
written that were quite famous in Armenia. I ordered the two volumes
from Beirut and had friend of mine translate the table of contents.
When I saw just the table of contents I was shattered-overwhelmed, and
from there on it took me and a collaborator a decade to translate all
71 chapters.

Q: It's a very important historical document, but why did you feel you
should be the one to translate this quite depressing work that took 10
years to complete?

A: I have been writing about the Armenian Genocide for a while, much
of my professional life. And having discovered that this was my
ancestor and having come into the book it seemed almost
inevitable. Like an inevitable responsibility to do this and there
really was no way out.

Q: What kind of an effect did it have on you? There are some pretty
depressing scenes in the book including one where a girl's chest is
crushed and she's dismembered for not wanting to convert to Islam
through marriage. And there are mentions of mass killings of women and
children by ordinary villagers, who did the killing under a fatwa?

A: It is a book of relentless atrocities, this is true. But I have to
say as a writer who has written about trauma and atrocity and genocide
for several decades that I think the redeeming dimension here is the
power of truth, of bringing to the world large truth and profound
human experience even though that experience is a dark one. Excavating
truth and profound experience is something that transcends anything
that might seem debilitating about working on this kind of a book.

Q: Which part of your great uncle's story stands out most?

A: I would perhaps point to several experiences. I think we are
brought so close to the massacre and deportation experience because
his writing is so vivid and precise and clear that one feels like one
is there to some degree. That there is a sense of closeness to the
daily experience of the deportation and death march. Secondly, the
relentless witnessing of atrocity, gruesome as it is, again is
powerful as a documentation of what the Armenian Genocide was and how
well planned it was by the Turkish Government. We see it happening in
village after village, town after town, city after city along my great
uncle's four-year march and escape. I also think a compelling part of
the story is the witnessing of cultural destruction of churches,
schools and buildings and a ruin of the whole great ancient
civilization of what Armenia was in Anatolia.

Q: Let's go back to that idea, that genocide is more than mass
killing. It's also about erasing a culture, a landscape, a group's
economy. What are the lasting effects of the genocide on the Armenian
populous today?

A: I think the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide has been a bitter
and cruel one, because the Turkish government has remained in a kind
of aggressive denial propaganda campaign to cover up, deny, sanitize,
falsify this history, and so the Armenian population world-wide has
had to live with the denial, and the attempts of the Turkish
government to evade responsibility for the extermination of the
Armenians. So it's a traumatic experience to have to both inherit
genocide and have to live with the denial of it. Obviously there is
also the issue of the eradication of the civilization, the loss of
place, of all the beautiful and rich things that were made, the loss
of life, irreplaceable loss of versions of the future and of
variations of the future.

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Topic(s): Philosophy
Date Posted: 05.09.09

Jacques Ranciére interview with Yan Ciret

In your new book, Le partage du sensible, you radically undermine the concepts of modernity and the avant-garde. In what way is this structure which was conceived in the 19C by Baudelaire and taken up by everyone from Walter Benjamin to the Situationsits and Tel Quel invalid?

I am not interested in some battle of the ancients and moderns. My target is the notion of modernity which is used as an explanatory category by both the supporters and the detractors of contemporary art. This introduces a problematic relation between the course of History and the development of art. First of all, it tendentiously reduces artistic transformations to one or two exemplary ruptures––for example, pictorial abstraction and the readymade, which are particular forms of a paradigm that is in fact much more general than that. It then makes these artificial breaks appear to embody the accomplishment of some political task or historial destiny. To me this way of reasoning implies a general onology in which there is some great master signifier capable of governing each age. This concept has ended up drowning art in a pathetic melodrama that mixes the Kantian sublime with the Murder of the Father, the taboo on representation with the technology of mechanical reproduction and the death of the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe. I wanted to get away from all this pathos and examine the specific functioning of art rather than the metaphysical moving spirit of the age.

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Topic(s): Rancière
Date Posted: 05.09.09

Revisiting 'Nights of Labour': Talk by Jacques Ranciere — S A R A I
Source: www.sarai.net

Video recording of a public talk at Sarai CSDS, by renowned philosopher Jacques Ranciere on the release of the Hindi translation of his book Nights of Labour: Workers' Dream in 19th Century France. (Sarvahara Raatein: Unneesaveen sadi ke Frans mein Mazdoor Swapna) in now available on youtube. ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW_LiwCKlg

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Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 05.09.09

Who Will Stop the AIPAC Jews Before it is Too Late?

Published on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Medea Benjamin

While I was being tackled by security guards at Washington's
Convention Center during the AIPAC conference for unfurling a banner
that asked "What about Gaza?," my heart was aching. I wasn't bothered
so much by the burly guards who were yanking my arms behind by back
and dragging me-along with 5 other CODEPINK members-out of the
hall. They were doing their job.

What made my heart ache was the hatred I felt from the AIPAC staff who
tore up the banner and slammed their hands across my mouth as I tried
to yell out: "What about Gaza? What about the children?"

"Shut the f--- up. Shut the f--- up." one staffer yelled, red-faced
and sweating as he ran beside me. "This is not the place to be saying
that shit. Get the f--- out of here."

What makes my heart ache is thinking about the traumatized children I
met on my recent trip to Gaza, and how their suffering is denied by
the 6,000 AIPAC conventioneers who are living in a bubble-a bubble
where Israel is the victim and all critics are anti-Semitic, terrorist
lovers or, as in my case, self-hating Jews.

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Topic(s): Afghanistan
Date Posted: 05.06.09

"They Can't Even Protect Themselves, So What Can They Do For Me?"

Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

By PATRICK COCKBURN

When President Hamid Karzai drove to Kabul airport to fly to America earlier this week, the centre of the Afghan capital was closed down by well-armed security men, soldiers and policemen. On his arrival in Washington he will begin two days of meetings, starting today, with President Barack Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari about their joint efforts to combat the Taliban. Karzai is also to deliver a speech at the Brookings Institution think tank on “effective ways of fighting terrorism.”

The title of his lecture shows a certain cheek. Karzai’s seven years in power since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 have been notable for his failure to prevent their resurgence. Suppose the president’s motorcade this week had taken a different route and headed, not for the airport, but for the southern outskirts of Kabul, he would soon have experienced the limits of his government’s authority. It ends at a beleaguered police post within a few minutes’ drive of the capital. Drivers heading for the southern provincial capitals of Ghazni, Qalat and Kandahar nervously check their pockets to make sure that they are carrying no documents linking them to the government.

They do so because they know that they will not have travelled far down the road before they are stopped and their identity checked by black turbaned Taliban fighters. Moving swiftly on their motorcycles, squads of six to eight men set up temporary checkpoints along the road. Sometimes they even take a traveller’s mobile phone and redial numbers recently called. If the call is answered by a government ministry or, still worse, a foreigner, then the phone’s owner may be executed on the spot. The jibe that Mr Karzai is only “mayor of Kabul” has some truth to it. It is not only when travelling south that the Taliban is in control. I wanted to go to Bamyan, the province in central Afghanistan which is inhabited by the Hazara, a minority ethnic group who are central-Asian in appearance and Shia by religion, and who were savagely persecuted and massacred by the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban during their years in power.

I last went there in December 2001 to look at the shattered remains of the giant 6th-century Buddhist statues which the Taliban had dynamited because they portrayed the human form and were “idols”. I wanted to see what had changed. If anybody benefited from the end of Taliban rule it should have been the Hazara. It turned out, however, that the biggest change was that I could no longer travel there by road. Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a member of the Afghan parliament representing Bamyan, who spent two years in a Taliban prison before escaping, told me that Bamyan itself was safe enough. The problem was the route.

“There are two roads going there,” explained Mr Jawadi, “but do not take the southern one because it is controlled by the Taliban.” He said there was an alternative, more northerly road and this was safe enough so long as, he added with the hint of a smile, “you bring plenty of armed guards.” He explained that a few weeks ago “men dressed in police uniforms” had stopped two vehicles belonging to a local bank, shot dead six guards and stolen the money on board. The best experts on the dangers of the road in most countries are not the police or the army, but the truckers, whose lives and livelihoods depend on correctly assessing the risks.

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