By Elzbieta Matynia, October 11th, 2010 
Elzbieta Matynia is an expert on democratic movements, and here, reflects on the recent Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiabo and the chance for Chinese democracy. -Jeff
The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.
One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?
There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.
When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard. The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.
Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a . . .
Read more: From Liu Xiabo: A Seed of Strength for Chinese Political Protesters
By Daniel Dayan, October 10th, 2010
Daniel Dayan is a French sociologist and an expert in media. -Jeff
 Once, I heard an American journalist condemn Fox News. The condemnation was deserved, in my opinion. However, the argument meant to justify it was frightening. Why – did the journalist ask – should Fox News be allowed to exist while its position contradicts that of all other American journalistic institutions?
In my view this journalist was not attacking Fox News. He was challenging the very possibility of debate. He was pointing to a consensus and requiring that dissenting voices be silenced. Obama was perfectly right in stressing that they should not (while still being critical of their position in a Rolling Stone article. Obama’s point is essential to the very existence of a democratic pluralism. Obama was no less correct in noting: “We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated.” This tradition is also ingrained in European journalistic traditions, and, in particular, in the French.
Interestingly, it is not this tradition that retained the attention of some of the most radical media critics. (I am thinking of such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Stuart Hall.) For them, the real danger lies not with those media discourses that flaunt their ideological positions, hoist their flag, advance in fanfare, scream their values. Such discourses are unmistakeably partisan. They are too strident not to be instantly spotted .
The real danger is with these other discourses that are so persuasive that they can be conflated with “reality.” It lies with discourses that seem neutral, balanced, fair, often intelligent . The real danger is with discourses that seem “self evident.” Such an evidence – present in the consensus that the journalist in my first paragraph pointed to — speaks of the power enjoyed by those groups who become the “primary definers” of the social world (Hall); of the power of constructing reality, of multiplying ‘effects of real‘ (Barthes); of the power that stems from ideology, understood not as a discrete doctrine, but as an almost spontaneous “way of seeing“ (a spontaneity that begs, of course, to be deciphered).
I . . .
Read more: Voice of Dissent Should Always Be Welcome in Debate
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 8th, 2010 
Neil Postman was a famous media critic. He thought that the problem with television was not its content but its formal qualities as a medium. It presented a clear and present danger. Because of it, we were Amusing Ourselves to Death. In thinking about the role of television in contemporary politics, specifically as it is facilitating new kinds of major media events, I am struck by the fact that television’s effects may be quite the opposite, when it amuses us, it gives life. When it is deadly serious, it is just that, deadly. I am having these dark thoughts thinking about Glenn Beck, John Stewart and Steven Colbert, and their respective demonstrations on American sacred ground, the Washington Mall, between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally, held on the Washington mall, with speakers on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial, was seen as a serious event, an abomination for those who were pained by the hijacking of the legacy of one of the great mass demonstrations in American history held on the same place, on the same day of the year, forty seven years ago, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, highlighted by “The I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. But viewed from the right, even from a skeptical conservative observer such as Ross Douthat of The New York Times, it was an encouraging development, affirming important cultural values, showing that the right was “free of rancor, racism or populist resentment, the atmosphere at the rally resembled that of a church picnic or a high school football game.” (link) Of course, on Fox the enthusiasm, the celebration, was less restrained.
Stewart and Colbert
On the other hand, the planned Rally to Restore Sanity, promoted by John Stewart, and the “counter demonstration,” the March to Keep Fear Alive, promoted by Stephen Colbert, are clearly meant to be funny, and there is truth in packaging, since both of the principals work for the cable network, Comedy Central. But it is being taken seriously. Arianna Huffington, . . .
Read more: Amusing Ourselves to Life
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 7th, 2010 The way you oppose a wrong determines whether you will succeed in doing a right. I know this not only through my readings, particularly of my favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt, but also from my experiences around the old Soviet bloc. The political landscape in the post Communist countries has been shaped by the way the old regimes were or were not opposed. The existence of pluralism in the opposition, the nature of the pluralism, the quality of political life, the degree of respect for opponents, the authoritarian nature of political elites and the citizenry, and much more, has been shaped by the political culture of the recent past, for better and for worse.
 I am thinking about this today because of an article I read in The New York Times this morning on the opposition to the possible awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a heroic advocate of the a democratic reforms in China. Predictably the Chinese government has warned the Nobel committee that the awarding of the prize to Liu would damage governmental relations between China and Norway.
Surprisingly, there is a petition of exiled dissidents opposing the award.
According to a group of strong anti- regime exiles, Liu maligned fellow dissidents, abandoned members of the Falun Gong and was soft on Chinese leaders. “His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential.”
The vehemence of their opposition to Liu despite the fact that at this moment he is serving an eleven year sentence for advocating democratic reforms, reveals that they view him not as an opponent, who has a more moderate pragmatic approach to democratic reforms than they, but as an enemy.
It suggests that if they were in power, they might not be that different from the regime which they so passionately oppose. In politics, as Arendt observes in one of her most beautiful books, Between Past and Future, the means are ends.
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, October 6th, 2010
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, currently a professor at Swathmore College, is an expert in conflict politics.
 A reasonably deliberate reader of the New York Times might have been flummoxed by an article that appeared last month on the front page. The article, titled, Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent, tells many moral tales simultaneously – none of them thoroughly, none of them systematically.
Beginning with the story of a raid by plainclothes Russian police on the environmental group, Baikal Environmental Wave’s headquarters (confiscating the group’s computers to search for pirated Microsoft software), the article presents no fewer than five topics and themes for the reader to consider. Among these are political corruption and abuse of power in contemporary Russia, capitalism’s dilemmas dealing with piracy, Microsoft’s complicity with authoritarian governments in trumped-up “crackdowns” on software piracy, problems of unemployment in Siberia and the re-opening of a paper factory in Irkutsk, and the pollution of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, by just such factories.
A long article, continuing on an inside page and including three photographs (one of dead fish on the banks of the lake) and one chart, the article promises an in-depth report of a significant story. But what is the story?
Normally, newspapers neatly divide the world of news into pre-ordained categories of experience – International News, National News, Sports, Business, Health and Science, Home, Arts and Leisure. These divisions give us readers an illusion of clarity and coherence when absorbing information about real-world events. But events are complicated and don’t come in pre-packaged categories. So on the one hand, kudos to the New York Times for short-circuiting the readers’ expectations.
But on the other hand, the story also short-circuits the reader’s ability to make critical connections among the issues inelegantly tumbled together (capitalism, authoritarianism, unemployment, and environmentalism), or the ability to move upward to a higher level of analysis, and to critique the assumptions of a world-view that, in spite of its acknowledgment of political dissent, is never troubled by the imperatives of capitalism itself.
Here, David Harvey’s book, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference is a useful interlocutor. Harvey aims to do precisely . . .
Read more: Reading the News
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 5th, 2010
Fox News is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape.
 President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday. They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism. (link)
Their response is cynical. They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise. Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism? Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him? These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows.
But actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:
Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”
President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you . . .
Read more: Obama v. Fox News
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 1st, 2010 
 Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond. She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.
She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post. I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.
Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation. Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things. She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff
Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever? Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of the . . .
Read more: In South Africa: A Young Leader Ignites Passion, Controversy
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