From all of us at DC, we wish you a happy and safe New Year!
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Chris Eberhardt was an India China Institute Fellow at the New School in 2008. He is now conducting his dissertation research in China A fellow of the India China Institute (ICI) has been arrested. He was privately eating dinner with others in Beijing, celebrating that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After hearing that the ICI Fellow had been arrested, I decided to read an article by Liu Xiaobo that was published in 2006 in the journal Social Research titled “Reform in China: The Role of Civil Society.” The work reminded me of Neither Gods Nor Emperors by sociologist Craig Calhoun, who analyses the student protests of 1989 that culminated in demonstrations on Tiananmen Square and the military response. What I see in both works is an effort by the Chinese people to challenge China to be better at what it claims to be, linking back to movements that emerged when the dynasty system collapsed in the early 1900’s. While Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, China was celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic. During the celebrations I went multiple times to Tiananmen Square. One night I saw a couple posing in front of flashing lights (pictured), behind which was Tiananmen Gate and Chairman Mao’s picture. I imagine that this man was probably wearing similar clothing when Mao was still alive. Every time I see a man wearing the blue hat and suit, it gives me pause. In Beijing, I am most likely to see people dressed like this fresh off the train or lined up by the thousands at 6am (2hrs early) on Tiananmen Square to view Mao’s remains. I always wonder to myself how these people who line up for hours to view Mao, sleepy-eyed and just off a bus, understand a China where students pay almost as much or more than my rent to buy name brand clothing. It is these people who come from the heartland of China who are still thought of as the backbone of the country, still composing the majority of the population. Perhaps it is not as well known, but . . . Read more: Intellectuals and the Common People in China 
Vince Carducci is a doctorial candidate in sociology at the New School. In his post, he highlights an important development in trade policies–one that was ignored by the mainstream Western press.
Brazil is fast setting the pace for both developed and developing nations by declaring itself the world’s first “Fair Trade” nation, an announcement that comes on the heels of the election of its first woman president. Scholars and advocates have taken note. But while Dilma Rousseff’s election has been reported, the Fair Trade story has gone unnoticed in the mainstream Western media. On November 17, President Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, whose tenure ends at the end of this year, signed a decree formally establishing a National System of Fair Trade. At the same time, he initiated a national business incubator network to encourage grassroots economic development. The actions continue the evolution begun in 2004 with the establishment within the Ministry of Work and Employment of the National Secretary of Solidarity Economics to liaise with federal government bureaus, local municipalities, and civil society organizations in developing policies and programs that foster economic and political equity and social inclusion in Brazil. What is “Fair Trade?” To better understand this event, one must distinguish between the concepts of Fair Trade and solidarity economics. Fair Trade is more commonly known to American consumers and entails a specific set of exchange practices. These include: pricing floors, living wages, long-term financing guarantees and purchasing agreements, profit sharing, community reinvestment, and the like, the costs of which account for the extra two bits or so one pays at the local coffeehouse for an “ethically sourced” cup of cappuccino. Fair Trade is sometimes called alternative trade because it seeks to circumvent prevailing market transactions, especially those espoused under neo-liberalism and the process of globalization. For reformers like Joseph Stiglitz, Fair Trade is a viable model for international development in that it advances “trade not aid” as the solution to growing global inequality. Yet Fair Trade has also been criticized as a new form of dependency, tying the livelihoods of Third World producers . . . Deliberately Considered is an experiment. My hypothesis is that the web We already have interesting confirmation of the hypothesis in the many posts and discussions in our first months of operation. A discussion that developed in response to my post on the Afghan women’s soccer team, I think was particularly illuminating. I started with an examination of an instance of the politics of small things. This opened a discussion of the big issues on the question of war and peace, and to my mind the discussion came to a strong insightful ending with a reply that used the perspective of everyday life to address the big issues under discussion. There were notes on all sides of the issue, from Michael who critically but sympathetically reflected on the American position, to Alias who denounced the NATO effort in no uncertain terms, and opinions in between, including mine. But Mariam Yasin, offered another perspective completely. That of a person against all wars and as someone whose position in the conflict provides a unique perspective: “There are too many stories of family and my family’s acquaintances killed by Americans, Soviets, and Taliban. This is not to mention the dispersal of Afghans; Afghans just want to be left alone. My family’s house was not shelled by Taliban, but by the Americans and coalition forces. Fortunately no one was hurt that time.” She made telling observations in her two replies: “Though I would have to agree that women have regained new means of re-entering social and political life in Afghanistan, I believe there is too much ignored by the strong focus on women and women’s rights… The struggles faced by Afghan men are ignored and effaced because, as we know, Afghan men are terrorists. However, their mere “inclusion” in society and presence in public life is also a matter of life and death. Those without beards, for instance, risk imprisonment or even immediate execution. Men and . . . Read more: Afghanistan War Revisited 
Irit Dekel is a graduate from the New School currently on a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin. Visiting the exhibition Hitler and the Germans: National Community and Crime at the German Historical Museum, I found very little new about Hitler and even less about “the Germans.” I did find interesting the display and discussion of the national community as connected to perpetration. However, the presentation of crime, or perpetration, lacked individuals and their daily choices and was instead filled with examples of the masses looking for security and stability. The exhibition was celebrated in the local German press as revolutionary simply for showing so much of Hitler, and for connecting his rule to the German people. It is not a small thing, this act of naming, and the exhibition does that, but then compiles exhibits: posters, photos, Hitler’s aquarelles, busts and books and Nazi advertising in materials that were mostly used for propaganda. There was a fear expressed in the press around the opening of the exhibition that right wing extremists and Neo- Nazis would come and admire it, now in the open. Those worries were dismissed as the curators assured the prospective visitors that Hitler is not presented spectacularly, and so those loathed groups, which also “probably do not go to museums,” would not come. Here is the first time where presumption about class, education, racism and origins from the former east could be easily detected but not explicitly discussed. The mix of thinking about what is presented in the exhibition together with how it will be consumed was at the center of the exhibition’s review in the German press (see, in German, a review in the Spiegel). The curators Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Dr. Simone Erpel, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach made sure that whenever a photo of Hitler is shown with his gaze directed at the camera, the affect of dimming light and photos of Nazi crimes will flicker in the background, so that the visitor is always reminded of the crimes together with whatever else they might feel or think of 1933-1945. An interview for the center-left weekly Die Zeit focused on the historical . . . Read more: Hitler and the Germans: National Community and Crime 
Consider season’s greetings. For many, these are unselfconscious gestures. But for others, they are loaded with significance. We can celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, after Thanksgiving, along with the new New Year, together and show respect for each other, but some prefer to exclude. Indeed, this is the time of year that I often feel like an outsider in my own country. It has felt this way my whole life, though it was much harder as a child. I heard, and learned by osmosis, the Christmas songs, from White Christmas to Silent Night, and like all American kids, I was charmed. I was trained by the mass media to be sentimental about the holiday season and the Christmas spirit. I was intrigued by Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But I also knew that this all was not for me, not for Jews, not who I am. When I was a kid, in a town that was 30% Jewish, 60% Catholic, 10% “other,” I did experience anti-Semitism of an everyday sort, accused of killing Christ by Catholic kids at the bus stop, having a hard time on my little league team with two particularly aggressive teammates. There was not much socializing between the Jewish and the Catholic kids, there was a Jewish and a non-Jewish side of town. It was mostly not a matter of antagonism, more about knowing one’s place. Any gesture toward Christmas celebration on my part meant, somehow, not standing up for myself. I was taught by my parents to question Jews who had a Christmas tree, to think that such assimilation was a form of self hatred. Yet, I knew then, as I know now, that this is an overwhelmingly Christian country and I am one of the outsiders. It is at this time of year that we, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists, feel disconnected from the mainstream. But when someone says Happy Holidays, as opposed to Merry Christmas, I do feel more at home. It’s an act of civility. What the talking heads of Fox News call the “War on Christmas,” I know as acts of generosity and openness. The proclamation . . . Read more: Season’s Greetings 
I received the following chain e-mail from a relative of mine. I thought of it as a good example of dangerous fictoids, because after I checked the story out, I found it has simply never happened. Here, read the unedited text of the e-mail: Thought for the day: Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist’ . Have you ever wondered why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news………an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself…. …against two murderous, illegal immigrants… …and she wins, She is still alive. Now that is Gun Control! BUTTE, MONTANA Shotgun preteen vs. Illegal alien Home Invaders: Butte, Montana November 5, 2009 Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. It seems the two crooks never learned two things: 1 – They were in Montana 2 – Patricia has been a clay shooting champion since she was nine. Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father’s room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun. Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor and was the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old’s knee crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals. When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive. It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber handgun he had taken from another home invasion robbery. The victim of that robbery, 50-year-old David 0Burien, . . . Read more: Fictoid from out West 
When we substitute a philosophic truth for politics, as I observed in yesterday’s post on the new political correctness, both truth and politics are compromised, and in extreme form, totalitarian culture prevails. On the other hand, factual truth is the ground upon which a sound politics is based. As Hannah Arendt underscores, “the politically most relevant truths are factual.” That Trotsky could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, is definitive of the totalitarian condition. I know we haven’t gotten to this point, but there are worrying tendencies. Fact denial seems to be the order of the day, from fictoids of varying degrees of absurdity (Obama the Kenyan post-colonial philosopher and the like), to denial of scientific findings: including evolution, climate change and basic economics. (I can’t get over the fact that it seems to be official Republican Party policy that cutting taxes doesn’t increase deficits.) The political consequences of denying the truth of facts are linked with the substitution of truth for politics. In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth and their relationship with politics clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI. The causes of the war are open to interpretation. The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances. The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central. Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around. A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation. There must be an openness to opposing views. But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI. Arendt observes how Trotsky expressed his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. . . . Read more: Time to Face Facts 
I think the relationship between truth and politics is one of the key challenges of our times. Get the relationship right and there is a reasonable chance that we will be able to address our problems successfully. Get it wrong and our chances are slim. There are many indications that we are getting it wrong, already observed in passing in DC, as we have discussed the problem of fictoids and as we have been noting the general development of the paranoid style of politics, and the threat of theocracy and ideological thinking. This week we will focus on this issue. My guide in these matters is Hannah Arendt. She maintains, on the one hand, that there has to be a separation between the pursuit of truth and political power, but on the other hand, politics that are based on factual lies are deeply problematic. Today’s post will be about the dangers of conflating an interpretive or ideological truth and politics, tomorrow’s post, about the need politics has for factual truth. We will then continue exploring this issue for the rest of the week. The Conflation of Truth and Politics Trotsky once declared, when he was still a loyal Bolshevik, Arendt observes in her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” The correct reading of Marxism, the official party theory, forms the policy; the policy enforced confirms the Party’s truth. Truth and politics are conflated and the result is that neither the independent value of truth nor the independent value of politics exists. This is the true meaning of political correctness. In Soviet history, this resulted in immense tragedy and suffering. Thus the dynamic of totalitarian horrors when indeed for a broad population Trostky’s way of being right was the only way of being right. Atheism, collective farms, grand industrial steel works, and the like were mandated by the truth of Marxism, and the power of the Party confirmed truth. Because “religion is the . . . Read more: Politically Correct |
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offers a relatively untapped possibility for serious deliberation about difficult issues, not just enclaves for the like minded and platforms to denounce political adversaries. New serious perspectives outside the frames of conventional reporting and analysis can develop.
