what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Is our Moral Outrage Relative and Selective??

It’s been more than a week since the horrific massacre in Paris – whose death toll could have been at least tripled but for the effective work of security guards at the Stade de France where a friendly match had just commenced between France and Germany….The lockdown this weekend of central Brussels may seem heavy-handed but obviously warranted given the disaffection clearly embedded in at least one of the Brussels neighbourhoods……

Given the long battle which raged around a flat in the St Dennis neighbourhood of Paris on Wednesday before some of the apparent perpetrators were brought down, it is quite amazing that only three deaths seem to have resulted (more so in Mali) but, sadly, many more innocent people in Syria have died as France has stepped up its bombing of ISIS targets in that country…..

Like most people I have not only followed these fast-moving events but have tried to understand the motives of those concerned….For me there are 3 basic questions –
- Who are these people, prepared to blow up people amongst whom they have lived?
 -  Why are they doing it?
- What does it take to get them to stop?

Although I have 7 years of living in muslim societies, the Russian cultural influence (for which read vodka) was still strong in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – although ebbing particularly fast in the last country… where indeed there was a lockdown in the Pamir mountains just outside Tashkent in 2000 because of terrorist activities…

I have, since that time, had a certain interest in Islam – to the extent, for example, of reading both Among the Believers – an Islamic journey by VS Naipul (1981); and Desperately Seeking Paradise – journeys of a sceptical muslim by Ziauddin Sardar (2004)

Curiously, few of the articles I have read seem to deal with the first question. One exception is Scott Atran and Nafeeds Hamid’s highly detailed profiling  in The New York Review of Books 
that 90 percent of French citizens who have radical Islamist beliefs have French grandparents and 80 percent come from non-religious families. In fact, most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are “born again” into radical religion by their social peers.
In France, and in Europe more generally, more than three of every four recruits join the Islamic State together with friends, while only one in five do so with family members and very few through direct recruitment by strangers. Many of these young people identify with neither the country their parents come from nor the country in which they live. Other identities are weak and non-motivating.
One woman in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois described her conversion as being like that of a transgender person who opts out of the gender assigned at birth: “I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body,” she said. She believed she was only able to live fully as a Muslim with dignity in the Islamic State. For others who have struggled to find meaning in their lives, ISIS is a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that many of them will never live to enjoy.
 A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS.
Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to be rebels with a cause—who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.

In another blog in the same journal a well-known Pakistani journalist (with a decade of personal experience as a guerrilla) looks at the divergent pattern of attacks on civilian targets by terrorist groups of the past decade and offers the obvious explanation for the attacks in the European heartland -     
ISIS is now determined to launch attacks against those states that are waging war against it. Turkey has just given the US government permission to use some of its airbases for strikes against ISIS; Hezbollah is helping Bashar al-Assad fight ISIS.
The Russians are now bombing ISIS and other groups, while the French are crucial partners in the anti-ISIS coalition.
French warplanes bombing ISIS from runways in the Gulf states are about to get a fresh boost as the French government sends its only aircraft carrier to the Gulf. 
ISIS’s message is thus clear—the group is waging an all-out deliberate war against all those countries that are lining up to fight it. Again, this is not an attempt to take down the Western order, in the way that al-Qaeda was trying to do, nor is it a reaction to the evils of Western heathens. It is a direct reaction to what is being done to ISIS by coalition forces. 

The background for this sad state of affairs is common knowledge. The emergence of a unipolar world system in the early 1990s has induced Western governments to push for unrestricted market dominance at home and abroad. Also, triumphalism has become the norm of foreign policy, which embraced military interventions aimed at regime change in contravention to international law and massive public opposition. 
One component of the ‘regime-change’ strategy was to support and collaborate with non-state armed groups. The first pilot exercise was the direct and indirect (through the ISI of Pakistan) support that the American administration provided to the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. The support took an ‘unintended’ form during the 2000s, when the Taliban were slicing off US aid to the failed state that the US intervention had left behind.
Then came the Iraq War, which created a large number of Sunni armed groups, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The latter joined other Sunni insurgency groups in 2006 to form ISIS. The recruitment ground for these groups consisted of Sunnis who lost jobs and livelihoods as a result of Western military intervention in Iraq. The link between Western interventions and the strengthening of terrorist groups was also evident after the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya.
Under the nose of Western surveillance, Libyan arms depots were looted and weapons sent to Syria through a NATO ally – Turkey. The Times reported on an arms shipment on 14 September 2012. This is unlikely to have been the only shipment.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article in April 2014, in which he exposed a classified agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create the “rat line” – the covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya to Syria through Turkey.
 The funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with full knowledge of the US authorities.

My third question does beg some further questions – not least the obvious one of why I haven’t raised this question before in my blog…..I'm forced to recognise that our sense of moral outrage is relative and selective. Indeed even to pose the question is, for many, a concession to terrorism……..

Translate it to more everyday behaviour….confronted by a bully, do we concede? Surely not! That's the "lesson" we've drawn from appeasement...Not surprisingly therefore it is the basis of most of the pundits’ commentary…… 

I think, however, we need to go back to the first question and be willing to explore more the nature of the people we are dealing with….it is certainly not the German friend Camus was writing to in 1944…
And the scale of games being played by our so-called allies in the Middle East (if not Russia) should certainly make us think ten times before sustaining or strengthening some of our strange alliances

update; by a pure coincidence, I have just started to watch this 1985 film "Brazil" which, despite its opening humour, sends shivers down my spine. We've been at it for 30 years??????

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Death in Paris

The death by gunshot of one innocent is murder – of 130 a massacre - regardless of where it takes place…it could have been any of us in those cafes and halls of Paris……And anger was my first response – at the preachers of hatred in the mosques dotted around the cities of Europe. I felt sympathy for those who would lock them all up……

But then I found myself asking why I seemed to have had a different response to 130 innocent deaths in places such as Afghanistan and Syria. More than a hundred innocent deaths every day - from American, British, French and Russian missiles in these two countries and so many thousands in Iraq and Libya not so long ago….. I can, of course, blame the corporate media since we view the world through its’ lenses and they simply don’t rate such “incidents” or deaths from “accidental” or “friendly” fire. In that respect, we use the same defence mechanism as so many Germans in Hitler’s time who screened unpleasant or unacceptable “truths” from their consciousness……

True, more than a million British people marched against the Iraq war a decade ago – and some foresaw the radicalization that would come from Western “interventions”.
Even George Bush Senior has spoken openly (at last) about his son’s stupidity in letting his advisers take America (and many in the West) to war…… 

Four years ago, a Romanian journal asked me to reflect on how the world had changed since September 2001. This was the opening of my initial response - 
The attack on the Twin Towers certainly provided the opportunity for the security interests in leading States (adrift after the collapse of communism) to regroup and increase their budgets and power. "Counter-terrorism” became the slogan behind which the State increased various surveillance and control measures over its own citizens. Defence (aggression) budgets and actions boomed; powers of detention without legal redress were increased; a generation of young muslims radicalised; and cultural tensions increased.

But the 2011 attack was by no means the only significant event over the decade. Arguably, indeed, governments and media have used the threat of terrorism to distract us all from vastly greater threats to our security and social harmony which have developed as neo-liberalism has grown apace and threatened to destroy the democratic model which was so painfully constructed in the 20th century.

Earlier that day I had read of the death of one of France’s last remaining intellectuals  - Andre Glucksmann who  was apparently the guy who had suggested to Sarkozy the appointment as Foreign Minister of socialist Bernard Kouchner (warning – the link’s writer is a self-avowed neo-Con) although Kouchner typified a Blairite “moral activism” - and it is his legacy which looks to have come back like a boomerang to hit France…......

France – despite its hostility to the American line on Iraq – has turned out to be more hawkish in Syria…..where even  the UK hesitates….A French book published only last week questioned this......That led me onto another assessment – by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker 
… when asked to distill Glucksmann’s contribution to French thought,  his friend and younger writer the writer Pascal Bruckner said that it was to put an end to any romance about Communism, but, more important, to reset the tuning of French understanding: he made it clear that building a more ideal world was a less important task than mending the evil in this one.
 I cannot tell you what to be for. But I know what to be against,” was one of Glucksmann’s favorite locutions. It was hard to know how to make a better world. But it was easy to see what was making a horrible one. Designing the ideal order was impossible work. Saving the victims from those engaged in designing ideal orders was not, in truth, as hard as our laziness let us pretend it was.

I suddenly remembered Albert Camus’ 5 letters to a German friend in the book Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1960) which made a big impact on me at University……Written originally in 1943/44 the letters offer a powerful argument against the nihilism of those who practice violence – or rather
I have never believed in the power of truth itself – but it is at least worth knowing that, when expressed forcefully, truth wins out over falsehood
His third letter contains an important message for those of now contemplating Fortress Europe – 
You say “Europe” but you think in terms of potential soldiers, granaries, industries brought to heel, intelligence under control…you cannot keep yourself from thinking of a cohort of docile nations led by a lordly Germany   …....
for us Europe is a home of the spirit…. Don’t worry I shall not fall back on the argument of Christian tradition….that is something you have talked of too much….Europe has another tradition…my tradition, that of a few great individuals and of an inexhaustible mass….two aristocracies - that of the intelligence and that of courage

It is difficult to imagine these days such a dialogue (however imaginary) between a Frenchman and a representative of ISIS and, if it did, the Frenchman would not be expressing philosophical confidence but rather anger and bewilderment….

We need cool heads these days - our elites (British, French or American) have become too polarised in their attitudes...........and seem incapable of exploring Middle East  issues  (in all their admittedly fiendish complexity)in a balanced way. We need Fred Halliday back amongst us…..some of his thoughts on terrorism here

Here is one balanced assessment – another here and a final one from "Salon" whose analysis needs to be absorbed by the hotheads amongst us

RIP

the painting is one of a Paris series by Maria Raicheva, a young Bulgarian artist, which hangs on the wall in front of me and always attracts admirers