some thoughts on newfoundland nationalism

"...[N]ational heritage [is] a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism." - Slavoj Zizek

There is definitely some weight to this idea. If I recall correctly most of the literature on the genesis of nationalism as an ideological phenomenon indicates it tends to form as economic development in a given society progresses from a primarily "feudal"/heavily agricultural/subsistence economic arrangement into modernity, and it almost always originates among the educated (read: well-off) classes. This is why I would suspect we didn't see the meaningful appearance of [political] nationalist sentiment in Newfoundland until the late 1960s/early 1970s; it was only then that the province had enough people well-off enough to give a shit about 'standing up for Newfoundland' (I don't think the Anti-Confederate campaign in the late 1940s was ever fundamentally motivated by nationalism [although it was obviously present, ideologically] - it was primarily a question of economic and political power for the business/political class in St. John's and the pulp-and-paper corporate fiefdoms of Grand Falls and Corner Brook. Confederation meant a loss of control by local [commercial, political, clerical] elites over taxation, economic regulation, etc etc etc.)

More importantly I think this particular idea - nationalism as ideology being a retroactive construction in order to mask a present social antagonism - is a good way to begin an analysis of the way nationalism has played a role in provincial politics since the beginning of the Williams administration. Presumably anyone reading this would be familiar with the way the provincial government has been shutting down political opposition (not just the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly, but wider media scrutiny and citizen dissent) by appealing to the Nation - recall the Premier answering Yvonne Jones' questions about the Abitibi expropriation (or the legal dealings with Quebec, or [political issue of the day]...) by implying she was a traitor!

The real question in this situation is to try and determine what social antagonisms nationalist ideology in its present manifestation is blurring. While I'm sure there are many, a few in particular grab my immediate attention - the 'conflict' between 'rural' and 'urban' Newfoundland ('rural' being primarily working-class, "traditional" economy of fishing, agriculture, manual labour, etc. with 'urban' being primarily the oil/gas industry, finance and commerce, etc.), and, as always, the broader class antagonism in this province that is beyond being pinned down to a matter of geographical location; I'm sure any of the unions who've run afoul of the provincial government could testify to this point.

Here I don't think it's hard to see why nationalism works so well as an ideology in the 'Zizekian' sense - what better way to override the actual antagonism between 'have' and 'have not' (to use the popular terminology) than to have us live within a conceptual framework where we are all 'Newfoundlanders and Labradorians', all of us united as a 'nation' with an illustrious historical narrative united against the Other[s] (the federal government, Big Oil/Pulp and Paper/Greenpeace, Quebec, etc). The provincial government here especially likes to make a full identification with nationalist ideology; the House of Assembly is where we are politically represented, and the governing party has an extraordinarily strong mandate (they control roughly 90% of the seats) with an extraordinarily strong executive branch - which leaves us with the bizarre political configuration where the Premier [on his own or through his cabinet] can effectively (if the opinion polls are to be believed) declare that "Le Nation, c'est l'Etat.. et l'Etat, c'est moi."

Obviously this is a very rough sketch of an ideological critique of the present political climate in this province. I think it's a good foundation at least, and if nothing else, some food for thought. But I definitely would consider it as something worth a bit of concerted research.

will the cat above the precipice fall down? slavoj zizek on the iranian situation

here is a blog post about important world news not related to michael jackson. understandably with terrible media practices infecting virtually all forms of global news coverage it is very hard to gain any kind of coherent picture of what is actually happening in iran outside of whatever western partisan talking points exist.

to remedy this, i have here a piece by slovenian philosopher slavoj zizek who is a smart guy who says a lot of really smart things. read it!!

This piece is copyright-free. Please distribute widely.

WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?

Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups.Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

http://supportiran.blogspot.com/2009/06/slavoj-zizeks-new-text-on-iran.html

And yet, over 58 million people still voted Republican

I'm trying not to get caught up too much in the Obama-mania - I mean yeah he's super cool and all but whatever, he's still just a career politician - but every now and then I remember why we love the guy so much.

Remember the guy he replaced? From the Washington Post comes this early piece on the Bush legacy:

Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

mmmmmmmmmm yes i love it tell me more about how the american government shit all over human rights in the name of freedom, as a disaffected twenty-something leftist irony is my lifeblood

although i'm sure administration officials had a really good reason to do something like that!

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses.

After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

i literally can't even add commentary to this it's like an immaculate satire, like bush created a parody so perfect it self-actualised

"are you crazy we can't release them, they're terrorist leaders! what? no i haven't actually seen any physical evidence that would indicate anything i'm saying is even remotely true but the army told me they did and i'm a big gullible idiot"

Obama officials said they want to make their own judgments.

"The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable," another senior official said. But "it's clear that we can't clear up this issue overnight" partly because the files "are not comprehensive."

Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases. Threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee were often required, he said, to persuade the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two."

A second former Pentagon official said most individual files are heavily summarized dossiers that do not contain the kind of background and investigative work that would be put together by a federal prosecution team. He described "regular food fights" among different parts of the government over information-sharing on the detainees.

A CIA spokesman denied that the agency had not been "forthcoming" with detainee information, saying that such suggestions were "simply wrong" and that "we have worked very closely with other agencies to share what we know" about the prisoners. While denying there had been problems, one intelligence official said the Defense Department was far more likely to be responsible for any information lapses, since it had initially detained and interrogated most of the prisoners and had been in charge of them at the prison.

cia spokesman then denied grass is green, existence of cia

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that the Defense Department would cooperate fully in the review.

"Fundamentally, we believe that the individual files on each detainee are comprehensive and sufficiently organized," Morrell said. He added that "in many cases, there will be thousands of pages of documents . . . which makes a comprehensive assessment a time-consuming endeavor."

"Not all the documents are physically located in one place," Morrell said, but most are available through a database.

"The main point here is that there are lots of records, and we are prepared to make them available to anybody who needs to see them as part of this review."

pretend this sentence is a witty crack about the term "military intelligence"

There have been indications from within and outside the government for some time, however, that evidence and other materials on the Guantanamo prisoners were in disarray, even though most of the detainees have been held for years.

Justice Department lawyers responding in federal courts to defense challenges over the past six months have said repeatedly that the government was overwhelmed by the sudden need to assemble material after Supreme Court rulings giving detainees habeas corpus and other rights.

activist judges are ruining america. (republicans believe that statement is true fyi)

In one federal filing, the Justice Department said that "the record . . . is not simply a collection of papers sitting in a box at the Defense Department. It is a massive undertaking just to produce the record in this one case." In another filing, the department said that "defending these cases requires an intense, inter-agency coordination of efforts. None of the relevant agencies, however, was prepared to handle this volume of habeas cases on an expedited basis."

Evidence gathered for military commission trials is in disarray, according to some former officials, who said military lawyers lacked the trial experience to prosecute complex international terrorism cases.

In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was "strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks."

He said he once accidentally found "crucial physical evidence" that "had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten."

hahaha awesome

I think the absolute best part of the Obama administration will be all the great things it will teach us about just how staggeringly incompetent and absurd the Bush era actually was.

It's really weird living in a post-Bush world.