Who knows how things in Iran are going to turn out? Andrew Sullivan has been invaluable; Juan Cole's comment has been exceedingly informed.
At Progressive Realist, Dan Nexon asserts that autocratic regimes are learning to get one step ahead of modular mass movements.
That being said, Twitter, a tool that really only makes sense when you have something both important and urgent to say, has finally come into its own.
It should be acknowledged that, whatever the particulars of the results, there are thousands - maybe millions - of Iranians attempting to change their country through peaceful means. And that truth needs to be supported by progressives and realists of all stripes.
God, we hope, truly is great.
Showing posts with label States of Exception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label States of Exception. Show all posts
15 June 2009
The Revolution will be Tweeted
13 April 2009
The Fly in the Ointment
...and the one major problem thus far with the Obama administration. Greenwald:
Simply put, there is no excuse, justification or mitigation for advocating blatantly unconstitutional and tyrannical powers or claiming that secrecy shields the President from the rule of law. Nor is the faith-based belief that Obama is a Good Person who therefore deserves trust even remotely rational or relevant. As Professor Turley put it on Countdown: "It doesn‘t matter if you are a good person doing bad things. You are doing bad things." These secrecy and detention powers are among the most dangerous and tyrannical powers a President can seize, and Obama's attempt to cling to them is deplorable no matter his "motives."Bagram, like Guantanamo, is an iteration of what Giorgio Agamben, after Schmitt, calls the "state of exception" - the prison camp, in which law and fact become one thing, to the detriment of the humanity of the inmates.
In a way, a hijacked plane is much like a prison camp - its passengers also hostage to the blurring of law and fact. That the West chose to reproduce larger scale sites of exceptions to combat the actions of the 9/11 terrorists does, I think, prove the horrible effectiveness of al-Qaeda's strategy - and the blindness, or at least the acute anxieties, of even a state possessing an administration as enlightened as the current one.
What to do? States of exception are theoretical "black holes" - so perhaps we should let them evaporate, as those in nature do. How would a conceptual "black hole" lose more matter than it gained? And I'm not just talking about releasing the inmates - because that's the easy part.
25 February 2009
Is it possible to discriminate against a state? (III)
Well, I was going to write a longer reply that involved various platitudes about the social self and the impossibility of meaningful discrimination that does not refer to a collective identity, but instead, it seems that said discrimination has been brought to an end.
Is it possible to discriminate against a state? (II)
Thanks, Aldous, for drawing attention to the upcoming Durban Review of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances (which, it seems our own country will not be attending). I remember the hysterics surrounding Durban I quite well, not least because 9/11 proved them touchingly fatuous, and also, in their own way, oddly idealistic.
Can one discriminate against a state? I think, to paraphrase the Rev. Lovejoy, the long answer is yes with an "if, and the short answer is no with a "but."
An individual qua individual can, I think, be "discriminated" against. In fact, we do it all the time - through friendship, love, catty comments, etc. This discrimination (the word comes from the Latin root to "divide" after all) stems from some inherent questions surrounding individual agency and communication with the "other," and can be, frankly, what makes life universally interesting. You can (and should) debate on the level of values whether some discrimination is "good" (e.g. smarts over dullness, etc) but in any case, to be "discriminating" is still a positive term.
Discrimination in a racial sense is, following Christopher Hitchens, a bit of a misnomer. It's division based on...what? It's not profound biological difference (which is a whole other kettle of fish - think of cases around those with developmental disabilities, for instance), but it's not wholly a cultural division either. To me, racism has always seemed to be centred on proximity - not just physical proximity, but also cultural, personal, and emotional, to someone, who, for whatever reason, is "not on your side/team/race/." A proximate understanding of racism explains how some people can reconcile irredeamably racist views of groups with a positive personal view of individual members of those groups.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that of course Israel, like any other state, can be "discriminated" against by other states - the difference between the system of states and the system of personal relationships being, as I think Aldous' putative supervisor would argue, not all that different.
Unfortunately, the broader crisis underlying the issue is that according to biopolitical models, the modern state elevates the ordering of life - and by extension, race, which is one ordering of life - to the centre of the state's raison d'etre. So perhaps Durban II should be devoted to more honestly discussing the various institutional tactics and strategies by which all states - including the United States, Israel, Iran and our own - order life, and the relative merits and demerits of each.
The Forbes commentary fails mightily on that score in two respects: first, it conflates all criticism of Israeli policy (as a state) with blanket anti-Semitism (towards a group, the Jewish people, that do not universally believe Israel speaks for them). This is a very old - not to say hackneyed - observation
Second, and to me more interestingly, the piece only inadvertantly and obliquely refers to the fact that it's proximity or its lack - with terrorists, with "Arabs," with a the idea of a Palestinian state, with the idea of Palestinians themselves, with the wall, with Iran" - that's at the root of the regional problem.
My questions is, where does the opposition to Israel from Arab or Islamic states coming from (because remember, these aren't quite the same thing). Is it opposition to the Jewish people's existence - opposition that the Quran at endorses any more than the Bible does? Or is it opposition to the Israeli state, for a wide variety of reasosn? I guess this is the $64,000 dollar question.
That's my two cents. John? 'Dous?
20 October 2007
Paging Carl Schmitt...
NSPD-51 and Rosenbaum's take on it from Slate.
Just the latest incidence of the ongoing tension between sovereignty and liberalism in international politics. (Am I overly obsessed with a question from this year's IR qualifying exams?)
"Sovereign is he who decides the exception..."
It is the policy of the United States to maintain a comprehensive and effective continuity capability composed of Continuity of Operations and Continuity of Government programs in order to ensure the preservation of our form of government under the Constitution and the continuing performance of National Essential Functions under all conditions.
[...]The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
