By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 8th, 2013 
Last week, I intended to write my reflections on President Obama’s speech at the commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Instead, I offered my ambivalent thoughts on Obama on Syria. Summarized in my opening: “Two Cheers for Obama.” The potentially tragic decisions of the week overshadowed, in my mind, the enduring accomplishments and challenges of decades. Obama is not only threatening Assad. Assad is threatening Obama. A march to war overshadowed a poignant remembrance of this historic march of 1963.
I closed my reflections by expressing my fear that this overshadowing may become emblematic of the Obama presidency: significant work on jobs and freedom challenged by questionable military and national security adventures, including not only the potential attack on Syria, but also drone warfare and heightened domestic and international surveillance. Unlike the President’s full-throated critics on the left and the right, I am not convinced that his positions have been simply wrong. Yet, I too sense that there is a pattern here that is troubling, especially so since the ideals which Barack Obama embodies, symbolizes and has acted to fortify are of such crucial importance to the vigor and health of the American body politic, revealed in his speech commemorating the great civil rights march and its most powerful leader, Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama’s talk, like King’s, is not cheap. His words often act. He is the only man to have been elected President of the United States based on a speech, (William Jennings Bryant was nominated but not elected), and his speeches, in form as well as content, continue to be consequential. This was my hope when I watched and then read the text, despite recent events in Syria, and the possibility of an American attack. Obama’s words on jobs and freedom, and the people who marched on Washington, tell us something about who we are, where we are going, and by what means, and as I see it, even offer interesting insights into the Syrian dilemmas.
The speech revolved . . .
Read more: Obama on Remembering Jobs and Freedom: Three Cheers for Obama?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 1st, 2013 
Two cheers for President Obama! On his performance leading up to his speech yesterday in the Rose Garden. See video below.
Great that he is going to Congress. I hope this sets a precedent, making it harder in the future for Presidents unilaterally, and contrary to the constitution, to go to war. No guarantee this will be the case, but it is very much worth the effort, notable here because it is far from clear that the President will get the support he seeks.
Cheer two: I am pleased that he is standing against chemical warfare. Too many of my friends on the left are missing this point. In their generalized criticism about American power in the world (thus, for example, America now is “waging war on Syria”), they seem to not understand, even seem to purposively ignore, that the Assad regime in Syria has engaged in a horrific act, one of the few times since WWI that chemical weapons have been used so openly.
I know this is not the only time. I know that the U.S. was silent when Iraq used such weapons against Iran. I know that the U.S. has used chemicals in Vietnam and Iraq, and I know that Israel has used chemicals in Gaza. But Assad used chemical weapons for the sole purpose of indiscriminately killing people, his fellow citizens, actually his subjects. It was state terror, pure and simple. There are those who point to the less than certain evidence, but I think a pretty clear case has been made by the White House, and those who still doubt that Assad is a butcher do so out of willful ignorance, powered by ideology, close to home, a blind anti-Americanism. To the contrary, I believe that sometimes, there is something worse than American power, and sometimes, the U.S. does the right thing. As an expert on East and Central Europe, I especially appreciate this.
. . .
Read more: Obama on Syria
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 26th, 2013 
To skip this introduction and go directly to read Alexander Mirescu’s In-Depth Analysis “Civil Society in Tunisia: The Arab Spring Comes Home to Roost,” click here.
The Arab Spring is now commonly understood as a tragedy, if not a colossal failure. Those who “knew” that Islam and democracy are fundamentally incompatible feel vindicated. Those critical of American foreign policy find their criticisms confirmed, whether the object of their criticism is that of realpolik – the U.S. should have never supported the purported democratic uprising – or more idealistic – the U.S. should have supported such forces sooner and more thoroughly. I believe these common understandings and criticisms are fundamentally mistaken, based as they are on lazy comparative analysis, not paying attention to the details of political and cultural struggles, and by ethnocentric obsessions and superpower fantasy, not realizing how much the fate of nations is based on local and not global struggles.
In today’s post on Tunisia, a very different understanding is suggested, as I as the author of The Politics of Small Things, see it. The uprising in the Middle East of 2011, sparked by protests in Tunisia, opened up possibilities for fundamental transformation. The possibilities were opened by ordinary people, when they spoke to each other, in their differences, about their common concerns, and developed a capacity to act upon their concerns. In most countries in the region, one way or another, the power these people created together faced other powers and has been overwhelmed. But the game isn’t over, as this report on civic associations in Tunisia shows. The report suggests a corollary to the old adage: those who live by the sword, die by the sword. The persistence of civic action in Tunisia suggests a continued opening: those who manage to speak and act in the presence of others, in their differences, with common principled commitment to their public interaction, open the possibility of an alternative to tragedy.
The promise of the Arab Spring may yet live in . . .
Read more: Civil Society in Tunisia: The Arab Spring Comes Home to Roost (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 14th, 2013 
Now that the Obama administration has concluded that the red line has been crossed, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people, there will be more military aid for the rebels from the U.S. and its allies. Although this will certainly affect the course of the war (though the rebels and their strong supporters, such as John McCain, will demand more), equally certain is that this aid will not on its own positively affect the prospects for a just peace, with an improved situation for the Syrian people in their diversity.
The dark situation that Hakan Topal described in his last post on Syria (and Turkey and its neo-Ottoman foreign policy) stands: profoundly undemocratic and illiberal, brutal and barbarian actions are on both sides of the Syrian military conflict. The victory of one side or the other is likely to yield very unpleasant outcomes, as each side reveals itself with more and more horrific means of fighting, and more and more sectarian commitments.
The story of the Syrian opposition is tragic. A very hopeful peaceful protest was heartlessly repressed. The bravery of peaceful protestors in the face of military force, including bombings, was remarkable. I watched the persistence of the protests in the face of brutal force with wonder and deep admiration. Violent resistance was an understandable last resort.
But as resistance fighters have replaced peaceful protesters, and as the war has escalated, with the fortunes of each side rising and falling, the nature of the war seems to have fundamentally undermined the ideals of the protest. Islamist true belief seems to have overwhelmed democratic and pluralistic commitment. Sectarian interest, defense and retribution seem to animate the resistance’s actions, no less than the actions of the government forces and the forces of Hezbollah.
I want to believe that out of this mess something less than horrific may result. But by reading the headlines and the debates here in the U.S., . . .
Read more: Syria: Despair, Tragedy and Hope
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 19th, 2011 
President Barack Obama gave a powerful speech today, one of his best. The president was again eloquent, but there is concern here in the U.S. and also abroad in the Arab world, that eloquence is not enough, that it may in fact be more of the problem than the solution. The fine words don’t seem to have substance in Egypt, according to a report in The Washington Post. There appears to be a global concern that Obama’s talk is cheap. Obama’s “Cairo Speech” all over again, one Egyptian declared. Now is the time for decisive action. Now is the time for the President of the United States to put up or shut up. (Of course, what exactly is to be put up is another matter.)
This reminds me of another powerful writer-speaker, President Vaclav Havel. Havel is the other president in my lifetime that I have deeply admired. Both he and Obama are wonderful writers and principled politicians, both have been criticized for the distance between their rhetorical talents and their effectiveness in realizing their principles.
Agreeing with the criticisms of Havel, I sometimes joke about my developing assessment of him. I first knew about Vaclav Havel as a bohemian, as a very interesting absurdist playwright. I wrote my dissertation about Polish theater when this was still his primary occupation, and I avidly read his work then as I tried to understand why theater played such an important role in the opposition to Communism in Central Europe.
I then came to know him as one of the greatest political essayists and dissidents of the twentieth century. At the theoretical core of two of my books, Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind and The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times are the ideas to be found in Havel’s greatest essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”
However, as president, Havel was not so accomplished. He presided over the breakup of Czechoslovakia, a development he opposed passionately, but ineffectually. He sometimes seemed to think that he could right a political problem by writing a telling . . .
Read more: Reflections on President Obama’s Speech on the Middle East and North Africa
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 24th, 2010 
In my previous research, I’ve examined how local arts movements can have a big impact on regional politics.
There was an interesting article in The New York Times last Sunday about a poetry salon in Damascus, Syria. It reminded me of the theater movement I studied in Poland in the 1970s. Both the theater movement and the poetry salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies. I think they demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.
The secret police are present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus today, The Times reports, but it is also a place where innovative poetry is read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility is created. Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns predominate. The point is not political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging. The article quotes a patron about a recent reading. “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”
Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails. But in Poland, the safety valve overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explained in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind.
I don’t want to assert that this happy ending is always the result of such cultural work. Clearly, it’s not. But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order. Poland was not simply a repressive country then, and Syria is not simply repressive now. They are . . .
Read more: In Syria: Poetry Salon Provides Release, Freedom
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|