By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 24th, 2011 
I am not completely satisfied with my last post. I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough. I wanted to express my appreciation of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan, while highlighting what I see to be the limitations of his foreign policy. I wanted to show how, judged realistically, Obama’s speech on the Afghanistan drawdown was a significant advance, but also wanted to show why I think he did not go far enough. It’s about principles, not numbers.
Obama presented a vision of change in the direction of American foreign policy, although he didn’t fundamentally question the premise of America as a superpower with global responsibilities. I appreciate and support the vision, but question the premise. I also worry about the identification of defense of country and national security with military capability and response. But, I don’t expect the President of the United States to publicly challenge this identification. He is commander-in-chief and a politician who must ultimately make sense to the majority of the American people, while I can happily call myself a pragmatic pacifist, with all the contradictions that involves. The speech struck me as being successful because Obama linked short terms goals with long term ends, i.e. withdrawing from an unpopular war while diminishing the power of Al Qaeda and giving Afghans a decent chance at determining their own just future, with changing the direction of American foreign policy.
I want a change of direction more radical than the President, but I still can’t be against all wars. Although I realize that non-violent action often gets  things done more effectively and decisively than violent action, I believe that sometimes violence, including military force, is necessary. I understand, even support, the military action in Libya, but I also realize that the use of force in such situations is an indication of weakness. . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: War and Peace
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 23rd, 2011 
In his remarks to the nation last night on the way forward in Afghanistan, the leadership style of President Obama was on full view. He presented a clear rational position, addressing immediate concerns with precision and subtlety, placing a simple decision about the pace of troop withdrawals in a larger historical context. It was rhetorically elegant. It was, from a strictly formal point of view, a satisfying speech. It was substantively, though, challenging, concerning immediate military, political and economic calculations.
I watched the address having earlier in the week attended a local organizing meeting of “Organizing for America” (which will soon again become “Obama for America”). The attendees included those who are realistically pleased with Obama’s Presidency, and those who were once enthusiastic, but are now skeptical. I thought about both the skeptics and the realists watching the speech.
An anti-war activist was particularly concerned about Obama’s war policies. To his mind, Obama has continued Bush’s approach, with variations on a deeply problematic theme. While he had listened carefully during the campaign to Barack Obama, as the candidate promised to withdraw from the bad war in Iraq so that we could fight the good fight in Afghanistan, he has still been disappointed by that war’s escalation. He predicted that Obama would announce a minuscule reduction of forces. I recall: 5,000 this summer and 10,000 in a year. He didn’t believe that a real change in direction of an overly militarized foreign policy would be forthcoming.
The announced troop reductions more than double my neighbor’s expectation. But I suspect that he is not satisfied. After all, the announced withdrawal of 33,000 troops by the end of next summer will still leave twice as many troops in Afghanistan than at the beginning of the Obama administration. The Congressional Democrats who are criticizing Obama’s decision are representing broad public judgment that enough is enough in Afghanistan. I should add that I share this judgment.
There were of course no strong opponents of the President at our meeting. Although it is noteworthy that the first meeting I . . .
Read more: Obama on Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal
By Gary Alan Fine, June 21st, 2011 
Remember Iman al-Obeidi? March 26th was a routine day in the Libyan War. NATO was bombing Libyan military installations and, for its part, the Libyan military was attacking rebel fighters. Most of the world understood that Muammar Qaddafi was no democrat nor was he a threat to global peace. Once again, as in Iraq, the West was attacking a secular Arab dictator in the name of preventing the spread of world jihad. But by late March, the thrill was gone. The allied attacks had become, frankly, mundane. Another day, another ton of ordinance.
And then rushing in from the Arab streets, Iman al-Obeidi appeared. Al-Obeidi appeared at Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel, a gathering place for foreign journalists, and began screaming that she had been raped and tortured by Libyan soldiers. She grabbed the attention of the world, and became something of a cover girl for CNN.
I emphasize that I lack independent knowledge of whether her story, horrific as it is, is true or false. If I were a real commentator – rather than one who plays one on the Internet – my lack of knowledge could be a hurdle. But, then, as I think of it, none of the foreign journalists, even those who sponsored her story, has much more knowledge than I. How would one know? The correspondents at the Rixos have the drama of her presence, but others are as blind as I am.
The history of war is a history both of atrocity and of atrocity stories. The latter, all too common, are used to gin up public support for battle, creating an intense and potent hatred for a demonic foe. They create an enemy so vile that the deaths of our own soldiers are justified. The separation of true and false proves difficult to ascertain, even when the atrocity stories falsely accuse actual bad guys. It wasn’t so long ago – the first Gulf War actually – that Americans were told the grisly and chilling account of Saddam’s troops unplugging the . . .
Read more: Atrocity and Epistemology: Cruel Claims in Troubled Times
It was a funny mistake when the folks at Fox used a still of Tina Fey doing her 2008 Sarah Palin routine for their coverage of a story on the real Palin. I’m not sure if Palin’s colleagues – she actually works as a Fox commentator – are clueless, mean-spirited, or just have an interesting sense of humor, but it does make me think about the authentic and the fake.
 Wouldn’t Baudrillard have loved it? For him, it would have indicated the presence of yet more proof that actual people do suffer from hyperrealitis! According to Jean Baudrillard, consumers had long ceased to need originals. Thus, in a world where the simulated version has conquered the real, how many people will have principled issues with the mix up of the person and the parody? Or taking it one step further, how many people have concerns about the authenticity of the real Palin in the first place?
This brings me to the genuineness of political performers. During a recent show, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow served up 12 male politicians whom she placed on a “post-Clinton modern American political sex scandal consequence-o-meter.” Depending on the creepiness of their behavior and the extent to which they might be prosecuted, Maddow measured the cases of Florida Representative Mark Foley, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, VP candidate John Edwards, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and of course, New York Representative Anthony Weiner, and a couple of others. (For more on Weiner, read Gary Alan Fine’s post.) Did all these gentlemen think they could get away with extramarital affairs, prostitution, lewd conduct, and other such activities? While some of these activities may not be downright illegal, they all reveal little or no moral standards. In many cases, the behavior was not only hypocritical, but also naïve, as the compromising position in which these politicians pushed themselves would one day trip them up. To make matters even more complicated, the hypocrisy is a common element. Among the politicians who are the most vocal about . . .
Read more: The Show Must Go On
By Gary Alan Fine, June 13th, 2011 
Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.
At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.
Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in . . .
Read more: The Weiner Follies: The Personification of Politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 10th, 2011
As I reported last week, Daniel Dayan and I had a nice lunch in Paris on the terrace of a little restaurant at the Palais Royal. He ate blood sausage. My wife, Naomi, and I had couscous with chicken. I followed Daniel’s recommendation and ordered mine with olives, a dish that was his grandmother’s specialty back in Morocco. We discussed what proved to be the theme of last week, looking at North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of Europe. But of course, we couldn’t and didn’t ignore the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, then raging in Paris. The following evening, he extended his side of the conversation in a crisp essay, which we posted on Monday. Here I continue my side of the conversation.
My first response came in the form of an email I wrote him upon receiving his piece:
I don’t agree with you on all points, centered on two issues: the way the distinction between private and public moves (the most general issue), and how the presumption of innocence necessarily varies from one institutional sphere to the next, from the judiciary to the police to the press, for example. Consider the case of a child molester and how the presumption is enacted or not by different people placed differently in the society. This is an empirical and normative issue. More soon. Again it was great seeing you and great receiving the post.
In the case of a child molester, the police look for a suspect and attempt to confirm guilt, while in court there must be a presumption of innocence. Before, during and after a trial, the press and the general public judges, independently of formal legalities, and explores whether they think justice is done by the police and the courts, sometimes in a sensational way. The spheres of public activity and the press are different from the professional activities of the police and the courts. And quite clearly, when the issue is child molestation, the public and the press are predisposed, often without regard to the solidity of the evidence, to believe the police, given the nature of the crime . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: DSK and the Presumption of Guilt
By Vince Carducci, June 9th, 2011 
Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.
Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic . . .
Read more: Grace Lee Boggs’s The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
By Rafael Narvaez, June 8th, 2011 
 Ollanta Humala, a left-wing nationalist, has won the presidency of Peru. He obtained a narrow margin, probably four or five percentage points, over his contender, Keiko Fujimori (the final official count was not available at the time of writing). As I suggested in a previous post, Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing populist and the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, ran with the goal of freeing dad and dad’s buddies from prison, where they presently spend their days on charges ranging from large-scale thievery to murder. Many Peruvians feared, myself included, that electing Keiko would be tantamount to transferring these criminals from their cells to the offices of government. For at least the next five years, the duration of Humala’s future administration, this will not happen. For now, Peru has avoided the embarrassment of legitimizing, via the popular vote, one of the worse banana republic dictatorships in Latin America.
The future with Humala is uncertain. Throughout the campaign, he was accused, again and again, of “Chavismo,” of being but a sidekick to Hugo Chavez, bent on applying the obsolete and even ridiculous Chavista template to Peru. To counter this notion, Humala, dramatically and operatically, swore on the bible to scrupulously follow not Chavez’s but Lula’s steps, promising to actually strengthen the market with private as well as with state-oriented investment, while also building programs to increase redistribution of wealth.
No one realistically expects a Brazilian miracle in Peru within the next five years. But in a deeply polarized country, with an already large and zealous right-wing opposition, Humala has no choice but to fulfill his moderate, market-oriented promises. It is likely, therefore, that the economic growth that Peru has been experiencing in the past decade will continue, perhaps after an initial period of internal market speculation and attendant problems such as devaluation and an increase of investment risk indexes.
A couple of reflections
To be very schematic, two left wings seem to be emerging in Latin America. On the one hand, there is the old-guard, populist, anti-imperialist, caudillo-dependent, big-government-oriented left wing headed by Chavez (“capitalism may have ended life on Mars”). On the other hand, . . .
Read more: Elections in Peru, the Runoff
By Daniel Dayan, June 6th, 2011 
In France, is Dominique Strauss-Kahn “presumed innocent” until proven guilty? In fact, he is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Or worse, he is presumed guilty, until confirmed guilty since the French media usually expect courts to confirm their own “enlightened” judgment and can be extraordinarily vindictive when they don’t. Thus, a petition signed by thousands of journalists “condemning” the court that condemned the national French TV Channel Antenne II for broadcasting unsubstantiated allegations. This post is about the media treatment of the presumption of innocence.
Consider a driver who deliberately speeds and runs over a policeman in front of a crowd of witnesses in order to avoid being checked at a road block. The driver is described in the news as the “presumed” author of the policeman’s coma. The word “presumed” here is a language automatism, an adornment, a legal curlicue. There is not a shadow of a doubt that this driver‘s car hit the policeman. No matter how grotesque, the word “presumed” tends to be repeated in such situations “ad nauseaum.”
With DSK, we are in a situation where the presumption of innocence matters because the facts are not established. Despite various forms of lip service, this presumption is resolutely trampled. In a recent talk show about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, stand-up comedian Michel Boujenah expressed uneasiness about the fact that most of the journalists around him started from the premise that DSK was guilty. He reminded them that DSK had to be considered innocent until proven guilty. “Yes, yes,” said the journalists. Then they went on with their debate. To them, the presumption of innocence was an annoying contrivance, something akin to the presence of a vocal anti-racist at certain dinner parties; a presence that proves annoying since it prevents guests from cracking race jokes. The stand-up comedian reiterated his remark. He was definitely spoiling the fun. “OK,” replied one journalist, just add an “if” to everything I say. Just put my words in the conditional!” Then he resumed the discussion as if the guilt of DSK was beyond any . . .
Read more: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Presumed Innocence
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 1st, 2011 
I feel as if I am following President Obama’s itinerary through Europe. For me, it started with a quick stopover in Dublin on my way to Paris. My wife and I will spend more time in Dublin next week, where she will explore her father’s hometown for the first time. Naomi is one of a rare breed, an Irish Jew. Her family spent a generation there between Latvia and Canada. We are even going to be looking for a long lost elderly cousin. Later this summer, I will be off to Poland, on my annual teaching stint in The New School’s summer Democracy and Diversity Institute. These coincidences (I was also in London a few months ago) and returns come to mind because, as with Obama, my stay in Europe this time is stimulating me to think not only about European matters, but also about North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of European experience.
During his stay in Poland, the President met with former leaders of the democratic opposition and Solidarity movement, and noted that what Poland went through twenty-five years ago proves that the move from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one is quite possible, though also quite difficult. He spoke as a political leader wanting to position America and its allies together in support of the Arab Spring. He emphasized institution building, the rights of minorities and a free press. I don’t disagree with him, and I should add as an old Polish hand, it warms my heart to see my friends being used as an example of political success.
Yet, democratic consolidation is not completely achieved in Poland and among its neighbors, and there is always a threat, as has been observed here in Andras Bozoki’s report on the situation in Hungary, that a transition to democracy may be followed by a transition from democracy. This depends upon attitudes and shared beliefs of the citizenry.
![]( "Mourners in front of the Presidential Palace </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Letter from Paris: Thinking about the Middle East, North Africa and Central Europe
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Letter from Paris: Thinking about the Middle East, North Africa and Central Europe