totalitarianism today

Robert Fisk gets civilized.

Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East does not fit in a conventional-sized rucksack. It is big enough to burn. But I think I'll keep it on the shelf next to our friend, Samuel P. Huntington, so the two gents can drink proxy tea together and argue over the correct spelling of "civilization" and the generalized format of its decline. 

Fisk always brings something new to the table; his reporting on the Middle East offers multi-dimensional perspectives often centered on human beings harmed by nationalisms, identity politics, and modern, identity-centric wars. He tells the stories from the ground, as interpreted by the human rights activists and the unwitting (as opposed to the gung-ho soldiers). In the tradition of journalists like Sy Hersh, Fisk aims to "speak truth to power". For example, he talks to Hanan Ashrawi about the media's broad-brush coverage of Palestinians:

"When newspapers ask if Palestinians deliberately sacrifice their children, it's an incredibly racist thing to do. They are dehumanising the Palestinians. The press and the Israelis have rid us of the most elemental human feelings in a very cynical, racist discourse that blames the victims. Of course we love our children. Even animals care about their children."

Ashrawi's point is well made-- and yet it is common knowledge that Palestinians want their children to die as martyrs. Honestly, haven't you heard that before? Did you realize the extent to which this article of faith transforms Palestinians into the cruelest sort of mammals?

For an entirely different perspective on the Palestinian people, see David Shulman's Ghandi-friendly approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shulman's book review for the June 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine is also illuminating but, as of yet, still unavailable online.

Golda Meir and Hannah Arendt: The friendship that wasn't.

My problem was, simply, how to get a foreign minister to stop talking and go off to bed," Hannah Arendt later wrote. Because Golda Meir told her that she did not believe in God; she believed in the Jewish people. Arendt was shocked: "The greatness of the people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love toward him was greater than its fear," she wrote. "And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come of that?"

Golda didn't believe in God- she believed in nationalism, ethnocentricity, and the march of a Hegelian history which (on her view) posed a threat to Jews. Hannah, on the other hand, accepted God without belief (her views on God deserve a book of their own). 

Tom Segev wasn't impressed with Elisabeth Young-Breuhl's biography of Hannah, which didn't "explain" why Hannah's writings are so respected or so despised. I'd be interested to know if her fans are those who read "Eichmann in Jerusalem" after everything else and her detractors are those who read "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and nothing else. 

Cynthia McKinney says Israeli jails are packed with Ethiopians.

Cynthia McKinney baffles me. As former US Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and the first black woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the US House of Representatives. Her most recent career move landed her in an Israeli jail after attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies (emphatically "crayons") to Gaza on June 30th. Now a journalistic enterprise no less unsavory than Pravda publishes her "Letter From An Israeli Jail", obviously meant to hark back to Martin Luther King's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" (except, of course, that he was in Birmingham, Alabama, a part of the United States of America). Given the grandeur of the information age, McKinney didn't just settle for a letter-- she made a video from her cell block.

Letter or video, I'm still not clear on why McKinney focuses on all the Ethiopians in the Israeli prison. If she wishes to suggest that Israel's law is not neutral on the subject of race, she brings nothing new to the table. No one believes that all races or ethnic groups receive equal treatment under Israeli law-- the Israeli state is not founded on this particular tenet of liberal democracy. I feel sorry for McKinney, but not because she is being exposed to the realities of life in occupied territories. Instead, I pity her delusion that an American passport allows one to distribute crayons freely in one of the most unfree areas in the world.

Clear thinking on Iran.

Sometimes it takes a Born Again Redneck to appreciate what is happening in Iran. Or to quote Natan Sharansky, whose perspective takes history into account. Natan is hopeful. Here's why:

Every totalitarian society consists of three groups: true believers, double-thinkers and dissidents. In every totalitarian regime, no matter its cultural or geographical circumstances, the majority undergo a conversion over time from true belief in the revolutionary message into double-thinking. They no longer believe in the regime but are too scared to say so. Then there are the dissidents -- pioneers who dare to cross the line between double-thinking and everything that lies on the other side. In doing so, they first internalize, then articulate and finally act on the innermost feelings of the nation.

People in free societies watching massive military parades or vociferous displays of love for the leaders of totalitarian regimes often conclude, "Well, that's their mentality; there's nothing we can do about it." Thus they and their leaders miss what is readily grasped by local dissidents attuned to what is happening on the ground: the spectacle of a nation of double-thinkers slowly or rapidly approaching a condition of open dissent. 

To see the telltale signs, sometimes it helps to have experienced totalitarianism firsthand. More than once in recent years, former Soviet citizens returning from a visit to Iran have told me how much Iranian society reminded them of the final stages of Soviet communism. Their testimony was what persuaded me to write almost five years ago that Iran was extraordinary for the speed with which, in the span of a single generation, a citizenry had made the transition from true belief in the revolutionary promise into disaffection and double-thinking. Could dissent be far behind? 

This suggests another notable fact about present-day Iran. In Moscow in the 1970s, demonstrations organized by dissidents in an effort to attract the world's attention would often consist of no more than five to 10 individuals. Otherwise, the KGB would find out about the demonstrations in advance. They would last no more than five minutes. That was the longest we could last before the KGB would come, arrest us and ship the less fortunate to Siberia. Our main objective was to make certain that at least one foreign journalist was present so that, the next day, at least one Western news source would come out with a story that could in turn elicit a chain reaction of more and greater press attention and, we hoped, a vocal Western response.

The Iranian revolutions: A neocon's fondest daydream.

Iran is the latest galvanizing force for those poor hawks who have been disappointed by the nature of regime change in Iraq. I can almost hear the humanitarians on the Hill exclaiming, "Why just look at what those Iranians have done now! We need to come in and fix things for them again...." 

For the record, the Iranian people (and well-intentioned, distracted American citizens, for that matter) are still struggling with the consequences of the last time the US came in to "fix things". In fact, the term "blowback" first popped up in a classified sheet from the CIA's post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government. 1953 was a big year for Iranians-- the CIA helped to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh as Iran's prime minister, thus ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. At the time, the CIA had only existed for six years, but proved an enthusiastic and key mission-maker in the US war against communism. The covert action in Iran was considered a blueprint for similar coup plots around the world, so the CIA commissioned a "secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done". Journalist James Risen traces the use of the word "blowback" to this secret report, in which the CIA warned of the possibilities of "unintended consequences of covert operations". Of course, Chalmers Johnson's book is the must-read on this topic.

So the heat is on to muddle around. Steve Clemons notes that pressure from hawks in Congress to take a stand on Iran only complicates matters for the President elected to improve our relations with the rest of the world. And Reihan Salam wistfully ponders the possibility of Obama's "inner neocon" while making it abundantly clear that his understanding of neoconservatism is milder and less militarized than most:

The peculiar truth is that Barack Obama, for all his realist convictions, is at his best when he embraces his inner neocon. In August 2001, two brilliant neocon foreign policy thinkers, Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt, wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times that blasted President Bush for not being multilateral enough. They compared him unfavorably with neocon icon Ronald Reagan, who, in their words, "linked American interests to the greater international good." Though written before 9/11, Gedmin and Schmitt's piece anticipated the trouble Bush's rhetorical unilateralism would eventually cause. 

Obama, like Reagan, is a master at linking American interests to the greater international good. Whether he likes it or not, his engagement strategy with Iran has been revealed as a hollow hope, one that rested on an overoptimistic interpretation of Iranian intentions. As former Bush foreign policy adviser Peter Feaver has explained, Iran is far more likely to negotiate from a position of weakness than of strength. 

Rather than reassure the Iranians with a wink and a nod that we're ready to do business, President Obama should be building an international coalition to isolate a recalcitrant Iran as thoroughly as the the West once isolated apartheid-era South Africa. Bush, to the chagrin of the neocons, could never pull this off. But Obama can. But though Bush 41 was in many respects a smashing foreign policy success, he also made a number of egregious missteps, including the notorious "Chicken Kiev" speech, in which he essentially endorsed the survival of the multinational Soviet empire and not the nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe.

Afshin Molavi, an Iranian scholar at the New America Foundation, believes the Iranian regime has yet to cope with the ramifications of such a legitimacy crisis. Contra the hawks, however, Molavi seems to support Obama's careful treading of diplomatic waters. Molavi's observations about the Basiji suggest a counter-revolution could easily be brewing.

• Christopher Dickey works himself into a huff over Chinese and Cuban responses to the election results in Iran. 
• Matt Welch reviews Vaclav Havel's statements on the Iran, and finds Havel to be more concerned about the US pursuing oil interests at the expense of human rights in Iran. For the record, Havel claims to support non-military measures to dealing with the Iranian government's recent human rights abuses.
• Political Animal takes on Daniel Finkelstein's unabashed advertisement of his neo-con sympathies as applied to the situation in Iran. 
• Will Iran be Obama's Iraq? 
• For more photos like the one above, which shows a photo from the Iranian revolution which took place 30 years ago, enjoy Ahmad Kavousian's collection. 
 

Good morning links.

Tel Aviv is using social media to state its case in the Gaza conflict, but Will Ward of Arab Media and Society says the most effective voices in the internet propaganda war hail from outside official channels. Listen to the details on the social media propaganda war between Hamas and Israel.

France opened a permanent military base in the Gulf in order to "bolster" security. The base, located in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, will be home to 400 to 500 French personnel from the Navy, Army and Air Force and will effectively control the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Until now, only the United States has had military bases in the oil-rich region, but Persian Gulf officials have been talking about bringing in other military partners for several years as a result of declining U.S. influence among Arab countries.

The Russian version of The God Father-in-Law, the book of Rakhat Aliyev, published in Germany, is being distributed via internet in PDF format to everyone, willing to read it. The tremendous amount of readers' interest in this book has been fueled by Kazakhstan's Prosecutor-General’s Office's prohibition on reading and distributing this book which (in the opinion of Prosecutor-General’s Office) "reveals state secrets". Kazakhs who are found reading or distributing this book can be persecuted and sentenced to three years of imprisonment. Russian readers can get their copy online today. 

Pennsylvanians can enjoy the Guerilla Drive-In, a group which stages secret film viewings in settings that match the theme of the movie being screened. A few examples from their past: Caddyshack was shown at a golf course, Meatballs at a canoe rental company, and Ghostbusters was screened at the haunted Fort Mifflin. All the movies are shown using a 1970's Eiki school projector mounted on a 1977 BMW R100/7 sidecar rig. Those in Los Angeles can get their cine-servings in the cemetary with Cinespia. And GOOD magazine can get the hat tip.

Gorbie releases his first rock CD and dedicates it to his wife. 

Cold Warrior Daniel Pipes is still fighting-- this time, his front line takes the form of a media campaign to have the war in the Middle East recognized under the Cold War rubric.

Extras: Der Speigel devotes a cover issue to who else apart from the Germans and French welcomed and worked with Nazi troops in Europe. + Leonard Bernstein's somewhat symphonic political life. + Jerome's Einstein on Israel reveals the "essential history of debate over Zionism and a Jewish state". + America's third front: Obama and the War on Drugs. + Serbia isn't doing enough to stop human trafficking. + The fine line between a soldier's duty and his anger, the examples offered by the soldiers in Chechnya. + A terrific, firmly liberal critique of D-News editor Joseph Cannon and Paul Johnson by One Utah. Love it. + A young Serb tries to bring "scientific consciousness" to Serbia after winning a sex prize.

The Iranian elections are more exciting than Obama's latest scheme to save the rich from their own mistakes.

You know that Western-style democracy has arrived when pets in a particular begin to "express" their political opinions. The presidential elections in Iran were greeted with "unprecedented" voter turnout.

Iranian blogger-in-exile, Golnaz Esfandiari, explains why he has decided to vote in the election this year, after a lifetime spent boycotting Iranian elections hoping to withhold legitimacy from the regime. Since the strategy of democratic disengagement has not changed much in Iran, Esfandiari decided it was time to change his mind about how he applied his principles. In his words:

Don't get me wrong – I'm not being unrealistic. I know Iran will not become a democratic state anytime soon. I also know that I won't be able to return to the land where I was born soon either. I know Iran is governed from the top down and that the next president – no matter who he is – will be under the thumb of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But change can come to Iran, slow changes that one day will produce a democracy. I am choosing hope over inaction and despair. So, I will vote.

While few Iranians are willing to court the possibility of hope, there is no question that this election will be a critical one for Iran. The underground youth revolution has moved above ground; Iranian citizens are openly speaking to the international press about their political demands for reform. 

Reminiscient of the 1989 and 1990 elections in the former communist countries, where the reformist authoritarians were elected into power, Iran's situation might involve a reformist coming to power, opening the doors of freedom a wee bit just to let in a little light, and then realizing that a little light can only be a blinding light to those who have been living in the dark. In the words of Mardo Soghom, "Iran will never return to where it was two months prior to this presidential election." May the Iranians be given the opportunity to enjoy their own, unadulterated political revolution.

Best of the Iranian Web for Election-Watchers

At Persian Letters, Esfandiari translates the hubbub of the Iranian blogosphere into English, covering everything from the politics of wearing green eye shadow to exchanges between the presidential candidates.

Persian Paradox is the blog maintained by Massoumeh Ebtekar, Professor of Immunology, former Vice President of Iran, Former Head of the Dept. of Environment, 2006 UNEP Chamption of the Earth, and former President of the Center for Peace and the Environment, an NGP in Tehran. Good green reading.

Faith Today is maintained by an Iranian journalist "searching for truth". It includes a number of good interviews and access to insightful sources.

The Tehran Post, "cautiously blogging from outside Iran", and Rotten Gods offer an openly critical perspective on events.

Payvand Iran News provides up-to-date news for the Iranian community in exile.

The mecca, of course, is Iranian.com.

Other notables include Iran Diplomacy, Rooz Online, View From Outside Iran, Vote for Iran, and Iran Translated.