Red Light Politics
Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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Noted Elsewhere
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“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”— Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider.
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I’d be very upset if I worked at Fage USA and had to drive every (Monday) morning to:
1 Opportunity Drive.I suppose that neighbourhood has...
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“Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and,...”
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When the Lesser Of Two Evils Isn't Enough
by Mia McKenzie
Yesterday, I wrote a post called Michelle Obama...
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Try not to forget why they came to the United States of America, and though the specific circumstances may differ, you’ll find that hundreds of...
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Taken with Instagram
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Haarlem, Netherlands (by Epicantus)
Tag Results
166 posts tagged politics
“The Dutch state has always argued that because its troops were serving under the auspices of the U.N. during the Bosnian war, the Netherlands could not be held responsible for its actions. But judges found that after the fall of Srebrenica, Dutch military and political leaders were in “effective control” of their troops — even though command and control was officially in the hands of the U.N. “It’s the first time, I believe, that a state is being held accountable during a peacekeeping operation where things went wrong,” said Zegveld, Nuhanovic’s lawyer. “The state had always warned — almost threatened — during the proceedings that if that happened, there’s a chance that [The Netherlands] won’t contribute any new troops [to U.N. peacekeeping missions.]”
Court Says the Dutch Are to Blame for Srebrenica Deaths - TIME
For further context about my previous post regarding a military exercise in my neighborhood, this is the track record of the Dutch military dealing with “the Other”.
Dutch military on training mission in my Amsterdam neighborhood
Next Monday Dutch military troops are set to descend upon my neighborhood for a training exercise. According to the news, between thirty and forty soldiers, in a Battalion formation, will be in Amsterdam New West to train in “a multiculti engagement”* in a predominantly non White environment. Their intention is to “learn how to deal with a different group of people who do not share their same cultural background”. The news are being prominently illustrated with photos of tanks and soldiers in combat outfits.
Now, there is nothing innocent in the choice of neighborhood for this military exercise. The most racist mainstream media in this country, Telegraaf Media Group, refers to our neighborhood as “020-Gaza”**. Our neighborhood has been dubbed, even in official statistics, as “one of the most dangerous in the country”. I live a few blocks away from what, for years, was considered “one of the most dangerous streets of The Netherlands” (number 3 in the chart). When Dutch media discuss the possibility of social unrest of the kind that sometimes erupt in non White French neighborhoods or in the outskirts of Stockholm, my community is the one singled out as “the most likely” to have riots. The youth of my neighborhood, particularly young Men of Color, are regularly singled out as “dangerous”, “sexually aggressive” and “prone to criminal tendencies”. My neighborhood is used as a cautionary tale by racists attempting to make a point about the dangers of the “immigrant Other”.
This military exercise is part of an ongoing process of State mandated gentrification and “clean up” of this community. Real Estate is a precious commodity in Amsterdam and, a mere 10 minutes away from downtown, this neighborhood is, of course, a great location to target for expansion. The exercise cannot be viewed in isolation, as it is part of a bigger political framework of militarization of borders and ongoing rhetorical efforts to turn immigration and People of Color into a de facto enemy of the State. The fact that this now makes the news, associating the community with further stigma and normalizing the presence of troops is not gratuitous. This is a conscious choice by a State that will use whatever method to discipline the Other, to the point of inserting the Military in the heart of a community, contrary to basic principles of democracy and the rule of civil society. In the war against “the Other”, my neighborhood gets to play the role of military prop, to train soldiers in dealing with people like us, either at home or abroad. We should be afraid… very afraid of the doors this might open.
* multiculti is the derogatory word used by Dutch media to denote disdain for multicultural practices of inclusion
** Dutch cities are popularly referred to by the phone prefix that denotes an area. Amsterdam is 020, Rotterdam is 010, Utrecht is 030, etc.
Greatest hits of Victorian Feminism: Alien vs. Predator fight over intersectionality
You know how in the movie Alien vs. Predator two monsters fight it out and humans die? This is the image that the ongoing “arguments” about intersectionality between White British feminists in some very mainstream (and really well known) media elicit for me.
On one corner we have challenger Louise Mensch, fashion blogger extraordinaire (former MP) who, at The Guardian, writes “How about some reality-based feminism?”
“Intersectional bollocks,” in other words. “Check your privilege.” “Cis”. “Are white middle class stories the only ones worth telling?” and so on and so forth. Notable from their absence from these debates about terminology and frame of reference are male feminists; at some point even the most leftwing and right-on guy just tunes out.[…]
And that is what the modern feminist movement has become. Full of intersectionality, debates about middle-class privilege, hand-wringing over a good education (this is again “privilege” and not well-deserved success), and otherwise intelligent women backing out of debates and sitting around frenziedly checking their privilege.
Then on another corner, we have Laurie Penny, white feminist “ally of People of Color” who, also in The Guardian, writes:
“Intersectionality” is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years.
The Guardian, unable to resist the power of white feminists debating intersectionality among each other to decide if the theory is “useful” to them, enlists yet another opinion, that of Hadley Freeman, who writes:
It is, in other words, a sassy exhortation to acknowledge identity politics and intersectionality (the school of thought which says, for example, that different minorities experience oppression differently).[…]
The command to check one’s privilege might feel ubiquitous now to those who spend too much of their days on social media, but in fact the phrase has experienced a slow burn.[…] You can date the phrase back further, to 1998, when Peggy McIntosh used the word “privilege” in her essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
And then she cites Caitlin Moran and you know it can only go downhill from there:
The growing interest in feminism in the media – aided in a large part by Moran’s book, How to Be a Woman – also kept the phrase in constant use, with some feminist bloggers arguing hotly among themselves about the merits or otherwise of intersectionality in feminism.
The Spectator, riding high on the coat tail of all these white feminists with opinions on the usefulness of intersectionality, attempts to be original by publishing a piece by a white man who sets the record straight from the get go “Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You’re still wrong”
It comes, all this stuff, from the vogueish notion of intersectionality — the contention that hardly anybody who is marginalised is marginalised for just one reason, and if you focus on the main reason for their marginalisation then the more marginalised bits of their marginalisation end up being more marginalised still.
“Vogueish notion of intersectionality”.
What we have here is the latest saga in what I call Victorian Feminism where white people of certain wealth are anxious because the plebes dare to have opinions of their own and where the racial and class divides are being threatened by ideas created by the now erased “former subjects of the Empire” who, really, should know better than go around telling others to “check their privilege”. Needless to say, not a single one of these people have acknowledged or pointed out the history of intersectionality: why the theories behind it came to be, who created them and for what purpose. These ongoing debates, akin to a toxic spill ruining a landscape that now remains tainted by the erasure, all pretend that the theories and ideas they are butchering came to be in a vacuum. In this feminism, more reminiscent of a cast call for Downton Abbey, the “Masters of the House” are deciding whether the trinkets owned by the “service” are pretty enough to be appropriated.
Notice how there isn’t a single word about the fact that intersectionality was created, developed and advanced by Women of Color. Not a mention to Patricia Hills Collins, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones, and all the dozens (hell, hundreds) WoC bloggers that have been throughout time writing about it, advancing these ideas and developing new ones. Peggy McIntosh does get a shout out, though. You know, her condition as a White woman lends her enough legitimacy to be named. The media posting these public conversations didn’t see the necessity to include a single voice of a Woman of Color to bring this rich history to the forefront. They are too concerned debating whether the ideas created by Women of Color to explain their lives is of any use to them.
As Reni writes on her piece, “Standing on the shoulders of giants”:
These are the black women who came before me. In 2013 I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. The truth is, thousands of black women made the case for intersectionality before I was even born, and thousands more will make the case for intersectionality long after I’m cold and dead in the ground.
“Intersectionality” is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years.”
I don’t disagree with this article per se but I do take issue with the whitewashing and erasure of the Women of Color who have, for years, worked tirelessly to expand on sociopolitical theory developing intersectionality. While this article does not add anything to the collective pool of knowledge already created, disseminated and shared by WoC and allies, the piece itself glosses over who created this knowledge and for what purpose.
Also, I do take issue with the “schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years”. Either one of two things happens when you lend credibility to this: 1) WoC do not exist in this equation or 2) WoC are schoolchildren. Either way… no.
“Ultra-feminism’s mournful obsession with words and categories is making the movement a joke.”
How about some reality-based feminism? | Louise Mensch | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Ah yes, today Louise Mensch treats us to a new ouvre where she decries that thinking of intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc is very difficult and pointless and we should, instead practice “reality based feminism” (I wish I was making this up).
Here I present you with our new politics: Michelin feminism, where we have redefined the goals. Now we get to aspire for white, cis women to enjoy the perks of fine dining in starred establishments and extended stays in 5 star hotels. Because if we are going to aspire to the crumbs of capitalist, heteronormative, racist patriarchy, at least we should make those crumbs tasty.
The reality shock of “equality” in Northern Europe’s social unrest
Once again, witnessing the rhetoric pirouettes of European media trying to come to terms with the social unrest in Sweden and in the UK. While the triggers for these unrests are diametrically different, mainstream media, the great xenophobic equalizer, is using them to further the narratives around the “foreign threat”. The Local, Sweden’s main news source in the English language, enlists Nima Sanandaji , whose byline reads: a Swedish writer of Kurdish origin with a PhD in polymer technology who has written numerous books and reports about subjects such as integration, entrepreneurship, and women’s career opportunities to provide us a “liberal” (sic) analysis of the unrest. (As a side note, why a man with a degree in polymer technology would be presented as an expert in women’s career opportunities is beyond me). His analysis, can only be summed up as “those ungrateful youth! we gave them everything (these kids even got free iPads, would you believe it?!) and this is how they repay us!”. An excerpt (though really, the whole thing is worth the read):
Why then are we seeing violence in areas such as Husby? We don’t need to speculate. In 2011 the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap, MSB) published a research study which examined this very phenomenon. The study notes that frustrated young people in certain neighbourhoods have very low respect for the police, the fire department, ambulance drivers and other representatives of public authorities. Driven by anti-societal anger, they often seek confrontations with representatives from these branches of the public sector.
(Again, European media doing what they do best to fend accusations of racism: present the opinions of a Person of Color that most mimic the mainstream white culture; a permanent staple of Dutch opinion pieces, especially to quiet any dissent of PoC towards the dominant culture).
Tobias Hübinette and L. Janelle Dance, in an article under the title “Sweden: No Longer the Exception to Western Racist Rule” at Racism Review, wrote today:
However for ordinary white Swedes reading and watching the news it is highly probable that all the inhabitants in the suburbs are associated with violence and rioting. In the end, the Sweden Democrats (a former Nazi party which has transformed itself into a populist anti-immigration party and which, according to opinion polls, is the fourth or the third largest party in Sweden) will maybe become the biggest political winner due to the suburban unrest. Now, the Sweden Democrats will most probably gain even more support among the voters. Of course, representatives from the party have already made use of the events by calling for stronger police interventions and the introduction of temporary state of emergency measures in certain urban districts.
Once “exceptional” Sweden is no longer the exception to the general Western rule of blaming the racialized victim. On the contrary, white Swedes are remarkably unexceptional as they behave like racist and conservative white Americans. Ordinary white Swedes, who claim to embrace antiracism, equality and social democracy, look at the riots in Stockholm and blame marginalized youths for the institutional discrimination, political marginalization, and structural racism that have become common place in the former “conscience of the world”.
While I agree with most of their article, I certainly disagree with the title. Sweden, like the rest of Europe, was never an exception to anything. Pretty much the entire continent is funded on principles of White Supremacy and ethnocentrism. Centuries of colonial intervention, financial impositions onto the Global South, economic and cultural models based on centering the well being of White Europeans at the expense of the rest of the world have never made Sweden “the exception” to anything. One does not need to go far into past history, this is the present: the manufacturing practices of businesses like Ikea or H&M, models of Swedish corporations, with the inherent resource depletion and exploitative labor practices in the Global South are rooted in White Supremacist capitalism. Are we to believe that Swedish businesses can, on the one hand, participate in the systematic exploitation of countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, etc or use the forced labor of political prisoners in former Communist German prisons while, at home, “behind closed doors” so to speak, they can be a truly egalitarian country treating the people who hail from those nations fairly?
Sweden, like The Netherlands and the rest of the Nordic countries are usually presented as very equal societies. Economic indexes are often touted as proof of nations that are models of welfare and the well being of their citizens measured in tables, graphs, facts and figures that undoubtedly prove the superiority of these models. Topics like life expectancies, GDP, “happiness indexes”, education, etc etc are quantified, measured, tracked, made into statistics. This, the bureaucrats claim, is the measure of success. What they never take into account are the unquantifiable factors: how does a white supremacist culture play into this supposed equality for those that are constantly told they do not belong? How equal can a society be when its media constantly advances a rhetoric of alienation and racism? How equal can those that are marked as “foreign” (for generations, I might add) be when entire political parties run on discourses of Othering and different variations of bigotry and hatred? What does equality mean when those that hail from nations that have their resources taken away are then pointed out as “undesirable”? Those are the figures of inequality that are never quantified, never measured, never taken into account. Equality might look great in the binders of the bureaucrats but it certainly doesn’t feel like such in the bodies of those who bear the markers of Otherness.
“According to a release from the universities of Bamberg and Bonn, a study by economists Armin Falk and Nora Szech released in the journal Science found that markets erode people’s morality and help them make decisions that look outright awful without the thin veil of commerce. In short, capitalism makes us do some not-so-nice things.”
Capitalism might be making us evil- MSN Money
From a study released today. Read the rest at the link, it’s really worth it.
“I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.”
In Defense of Jason Richwine | National Review Online
Remember when last week the guy behind the Heritage Foundation report against immigration reform in the US was found to be a proponent of eugenics? For those who might not be familiar, The Heritage Foundation released a report claiming that the currently discussed reform would cost the State trillions (I love hyperbolic figures pulled out of white rich dude’s asses, by the way… QUADRILLIONS! QUINTILLIONS! The tomato pickers that have been barely surviving with exploitative labor and yet pumping money into our economy will cost us QUINTILLIONS if we give them dignity in the form of a residence card! IMAGINE THE SOCIAL UPHEAVAL! etc). Anyway, I digress…
Turns out that the author of the inflammatory report was found to be a proponent of eugenics, claiming that non Whites have lower IQs than the White American population. His proposition was that Latin@s should have their IQs tested before being granted any residency status (of course, “discarding” those who are below a certain IQ). In 2009, in his Harvard dissertation he wrote:
The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.
I won’t waste a second of my time trying to rebuke eugenics ideologies that personally implicate me (after all, I am one of those Latin@s with supposedly low IQs that is about to bring down the demise of the purity of Western White civilization… and you know what? I hope my “stupid” is contagious and I indeed ruin their purity with my presence but again, I digress). So, rather than trying to unpack his statements which do not deserve an ounce of consideration, I wanted to point out the beginning of the “polite right wing” circling of the wagons. This is not some Tea Party uncouth histrionics, this is the rich right wing claiming that eugenics deserve to be taken into account and that attacks on these ideas are based on misguided political correctness. The National Review, of course, enlists the apologists who begin the above mentioned circling of wagons:
I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.
The data sets are correct! These people are indeed stupid! Incidentally, The National Review seems more equal opportunity White Supremacist and brings up the claim that Blacks have even lower IQs so, why miss the opportunity to single out one minority when you can also highlight everyone else’s supposed racial deficiencies in the process?
To my fellow Latin@s living in the US, I can only offer my sympathy. Here in The Netherlands, the notion that we are deficient and have lower IQs has gained mainstream momentum (Ha! we are ahead of the curve in White Supremacist eugenics! talk about being trendsetters). Pretty much like The National Review, in The Netherlands, the claims of lower IQ were also “backed with scientific data”. We don’t need to look too far away into history to know the kind of people who took a similar approach and made analogous “scientific” claims to create policy.
The death toll in Bangladesh IS a feminist issue
A couple of weeks ago I extensively ranted about how neoliberal feminism has kind of become the default/ the neutral*. Some people were offended by my statements (I won’t bore you with an account of that as the offenses were mostly taken to Twitter). A week or so later and unrelated to my attempt at analysis of neoliberal feminism, I was told I had to “separate” issues of race, poverty, etc from feminism because they were not related.
This morning I woke up to news of an updated death toll: 1000 people so far, have died in the factory fire in Bangladesh.
In September 2012, when the European Union went through a short moment of outrage at the discovery that people from Bangladesh were attempting to cross borders into the EU, I wrote **:
Here is what neither the WSJ [ED: Wall Street Journal] nor European media or Frontex reports usually address: Bangladeshi migrants are escaping a desperate economic situation brought upon by decades of Western intervention and the perpetuation of an economic model based on sweatshop labor and lack of basic rights to feed the consumption patterns of the US and the EU.
According to a report published by the International Monetary Fund (not exactly a paradigm of humanitarian research), exports of textiles, clothing, and ready-made garments account for 77% of Bangladesh’s total merchandise exports. Bangladesh’s garment exports – mainly to the US and Europe – make up nearly 80% of the country’s export income. The country has more than 4,000 factories employing between two and three million workers and the industry currently employs 1.5 million workers, approximately 80 % of whom are women. More than 4% of the clothes sold in the EU are made in Bangladesh. The conditions in which these clothes are made, with salaries that do not even cover the bare basic necessities, conveniently forgotten when discussing migration patterns.[…]
Women, who make more than 80% of the labor force, are often subjected to sexual harassment and rape.
Here’s the problem I have with this neoliberal feminism: they have traded an in depth geopolitical and social analysis involving gender and the position of women in the West in relation to women everywhere else for the promotion of consumer empowerment dressed up as “choice” and career advancement. “Here, improve your chances at success by wearing the garments of your choice!” or “Here, see the latest fashion trends and pretty outfits! Wear this to succeed in your office job”, promoting this aspirational, mind numbingly decontextualized consumerism. The role models of this neoliberalism parading their manuals to better lean in and “having it all” chants as the only kind of gender analysis we are afforded. As women, we should aspire to rule the corporations that caused this death toll; as consumers, we should aspire to close the wage gap that prevents us from buying more “stuff”, with nary a word about how that “stuff” is produced, by whom and under which conditions. And when faced with over a thousand deaths, this neoliberal feminism will induce us to some form of rightful indignation (OMG all these people died! OMG this is terrible! ad infinitum) while obscuring the root causes of this death toll. Then, when the people that have to live day in, day out in these appalling conditions eventually leave and become undocumented migrants somewhere in a Western country, this very same neoliberal feminists will tell us that “migration is not a feminist problem” and we should “separate” these issues from gender.
To close in another self referential moment, I once said that this feminism thrives to make us better managers of exclusion. Nowhere is this more clear than in the atrocious death toll of Bangladeshi textile workers who supply Europe’s garments. Gender equality, it seems, is all about becoming the CEOs of the corporations that make these living and dying conditions possible.
* Yes, I am self referential today but I can sort of explain that: usually, I go through topics in a more or less long term way, with some of them recurring for years. There are a few themes always underlying whatever topics or news items I explore/ think about. I suppose I could call those the basis of my belief system and politics (notes on racism, xenophobia, immigration, feminism, varying degrees of leftist ideas, etc) and then I tend to spend days, if not weeks, just thinking of topics, even way past the time I posted something. So yeah, I tend to become self referential because those issues occupy a lot of my idle time simply thinking of them or reading further about them.
** See note above about being self referential.
“In 2011, the Netherlands shifted away from its longstanding policy of allowing immigrants to lead parallel lives within society, and instead began vigorously urging immigrants to learn Dutch and abide by Dutch cultural mores.”
Language Distance: The Reason Immigrants Have Trouble Assimilating - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
Here’s how media normalizes racism: take a statement created and spread by racist politicians (first Pim Fortuijn, then Rita Verdonk, now Geert Wilders if you want the genealogy of this myth) and then repeat it as fact.
There is no actual evidence outside the racists’ minds that people ever lived these often touted “paralel lives”. There is actually, a very well documented history of Dutch white people refusing (to give one example) to send their children to schools populated by non whites. There is also a well documented history of temp agencies openly discriminating against non white candidates. There are also instances of public services reporting WoC to authorities just on the basis of their skin color and their obvious foreignness.
In short: there has never been a “paralel society” like The Atlantic would have us believe. This has always been the go to justification to further promote policies of alienation and stigmatization for minorities. Now The Atlantic presents it as “fact” and this is how a racist lie becomes an accepted truth.
“Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans.”
Matt Yglesias peddling the lawless, libertarian capitalism @ Slate
In my previous post about this very same piece of trite, I failed to make a note about the poignant use of the word “choice” while promoting this lawless, asinine de-regulated form of capitalism. I cannot think of a better illustration for the gripes I tried to convey in my last piece about neoliberal feminism. As we know, there are so many choices a person can make when presented with the possibilities of abject poverty possibly leading to starvation or unregulated, unsafe sweatshop labor for the benefit of Western consumers. Surely that “choice” must be as valid as any other, non? That, in a nutshell, is my problem with all the theories behind “choice”.
“I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.”
Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK says Matthew Yglesias at Slate.
This is NOT satire. I repeat, in case you thought this was a joke made in poor taste, this is NOT satire. This is simply Yglesias peddling the logic of capitalism in response to the factory (sweatshop actually) fire that killed 300 in Bangladesh (300 is the latest count as of this morning, some news organizations are reporting the death count is likely to increase as debris is removed).
Yglesias, ever the cultural relativist when it suits hardcore lawless capitalism, also states:
Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States.
After Butler, on wishful thinking and situating oneself
I once told a friend that I disagreed with a film critique he had written because it was focused on what he wished the movie had said instead of what the movie actually said. We can only critique what is, I pointed out, not what we wish it said. Critique, I insisted (at least in regards to art or media) can only highlight a presence, a critique by absence, I insisted, would be mere wishful thinking. And yet, here I am about to engage in the very same wishful thinking I once decried as “not critique”.
I am talking about Judith Butler’s presentation last night, as part of Amsterdam University’s School for Cultural Analysis annual workshop. This year’s theme being “Dislocating Agency, Moving Objects, Associations, Demarcations, Transformations”. The title of Butler’s presentation was “Fragments of lost life: Kent Klich’s Visual Images of the Bombings of Gaza, 2009”. Her presentation was impeccable. Of course, I am not impartial when it’s about Butler. Both Frames of War and Precarious Life have been fundamental texts in shaping some of my politics in regards to immigration and what I call “the administration of death” in the European Union. So, I listened to her in a quasi mystical state, dare I say it, in adoration. And yet, I cannot shake off this feeling of absence from her presentation. What wasn’t said, rather than what was there.
Here we were: picture this former church turned University auditorium (complete with crystal chandeliers hanging from the roof and the church’s organ serving as background); the queue to enter turned around the corner and a tight crowd packed the entrance, anxiously trying to get in. The audience was huge and for the most part White and Western. She spoke passionately showing the photographies of what were once Palestinian homes, now empty, decayed, bombed. Yet, there wasn’t a single moment of situational awareness. More than once she said “As you know”, “As you are aware” and I found myself resisting this “as you know” which I perceived as a rhetoric device that assumed a prior knowledge I know for a fact (because I live here) is simply not there. No, a huge percentage of those sitting in the auditorium do not know and neither are they aware of the State interventions that make the situation possible, the very same State acting on their behalf. The assumption that “they know” allows many to walk away without having to place themselves in what they were witnessing. The photos then, a testimony of something that happens far away, something that doesn’t involve “us over here”.
I know it is somewhat unfair to place my wishful thinking upon other people’s work. This is the presentation that was given. This is what was, not what I hoped it would have been. However, as I said I cannot shake this absence off because it is at the very root of the lack of personal implication that allows the State to act without encountering resistance. As long as it’s “over there” or involving “those people”, then why would anyone need to revise their role in these (or any State) interventions. I guess my open question would be whether the academic has an obligation to not only show the photographies but to provide the frame that pierces those photographies together.
Frontex signs cooperation with Azerbaijan; political dissidents better forget about rights
I suppose by now anyone who has read anything I write knows about the lethal history of the European Border control agency Frontex. Today, this announcement was made: Frontex, Azerbaijani border service sign working arrangement. From the press release:
The Working Arrangement’s chief components include the development of activities in the field of information exchange and risk analyses, training and research-and-development related to border management as well as the elaboration and coordination of joint operational measures and pilot projects on border control. Sharing of experience is also envisaged with a view to developing efficient border-control procedures, enhanced technical capabilities and exchange of best practices.
Now, here’s the context not included in this press release:
On the situation of Azeri women displaced from their homeland due to a two decade long conflict with Armenia, Mehrangiz Najafizadeh writes:
Azeri women IDPs/refugees are the most vulnerable of all Azeri women. In this context of crowded living conditions, giving birth to children in uncertain settings, inadequate medical care and nutrition, and unemployment, women’s roles are precarious as Azeri women IDPs/refugees have had minimal control over their social and physical environment during these extended years of continuing uncertainty and “temporary” displacement that, in effect, have become a state of permanence. Azeri IDP/refugee women continue to experience a prolonged state of “temporary” displacement that now is approaching two decades in length. Throughout this period, their lives have been filled with uncertainty. When will the dispute with Armenia be resolved? When will they be allowed to return to their homelands in Nagorno-Karabakh?
Authorities Targeting Youth Activists:
The Azerbaijani authorities have a record of pressing bogus charges, including for drug possession, to intimidate and silence investigative journalists.
An Azerbaijan court on February 27, 2013, sentenced Bakhtiyar Mammadov, a human rights lawyer to eight years in prison on the basis of a prosecution and conviction that appear politically motivated. […] Mammadov represented several residents who were forcibly evicted from their homes in the capital, Baku, which were demolished in early 2012 as the government was building a performance hall for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest. Mammadov’s clients had challenged the government compensation package, and Mammadov alleged corruption by a high-level official involved in the compensation funds.
Government Detains Outspoken Critics
The arrest of two prominent government critics in Azerbaijan on broad charges of organizing mass disorder in Ismayilli raises concern they are facing political retribution. In January, mass protests in the town led to clashes with police. On February 4, 2013, Baku’s Nasimi District Court remanded the two men – Ilgar Mammadov, a political analyst and chair of the opposition group “REAL,” and Tofig Yagublu, deputy chair of the opposition political party Musavat and a journalist with opposition daily Yeni Musavat – to two months’ pretrial custody. A court also remanded Ismayilli residents Mirkazim Abdullayev and Elshen Ismayilli to two months’ pretrial custody on the same charges.
Now Frontex is not only cooperating but sharing strategies of border control with a government that has a long, recorded history of torturing and imprisoning anyone who expresses dissent. The only reason our border control agency is engaging this government as equal peers is to prevent these dissidents from even trying to reach the European Union to escape persecution. Better dead in their homeland than immigrating into Fortress Europe goes the twisted and cruel logic. On the one hand, the EU will continue to “export” this rhetoric of championing human rights, often utilizing them as an excuse for neo-colonial interventions; on the other, when it is convenient to curb immigration, they will sign shady cooperation agreements with States that are abusing these very same human rights the EU loves to tout as a “model” of “freedom and democracy”. In the meantime, the safety of thousands is left between a local government that views disagreement as grounds for imprisonment and a European Union administration that sees certain human lives as disposable, especially if they intend to seek refuge from unbearable living conditions.
“What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor. So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.”
This is a great read and, while it focuses on budget cuts currently afflicting the UK, the ideas discussed by Monbiot can be pretty much applied across the Western world, swept by neo-liberal policies of war against the poor.
