Subnationalism or Terrorism?

Juan Cole sheds some much needed light in this post entitled "What is Hizbullah?":

Western and Israeli pundits keep comparing Hizbullah to al-Qaeda. It is a huge conceptual error. There is a crucial difference between an international terrorist network like al-Qaeda, which can be disrupted by good old policing techniques (such as inserting an agent in the Western Union office in Karachi), and a sub-nationalist movement.

Al-Qaeda is some 5,000 multinational volunteers organized in tiny cells.

Hizbullah is a mass expression of subnationalism that has the loyalty of some 1.3 million highly connected and politically mobilized peasants and slum dwellers. Over a relatively compact area.

I take sub-nationalism as a concept from Anthony D. Smith. It would be most familiar to Western readers under the rubric of the Irish Catholics of North Ireland, or even the Scots of the UK. Subnationalism, like the larger, over-arching nationalism, is a mass movement.

Thus, a very large number of the Pushtuns in Afghanistan are sub-nationalists with a commitment to Pushtun dominance. They deeply resent the victory of the Northern Alliance (i.e. Tajiks, Hazara Shiites, and Uzbeks) in 2001-2002. A lot of what our press calls resurgent 'Taliban' activity is just Pushtun irredentism. There are approximately 14 million Pushtuns in Afghanistan and another 14 million or so in Pakistan.

The Shiites of southern Lebanon are compact enough to likewise offer a subnationalism. Note that this is a new phenomenon. The Shiite masses were not socially and politically mobilized until at least the 1970s, and probably it is more accurate to say the 1980s. ('Social mobilization' refers to literacy, access to media, urbanization, industrialization and so forth; isolated small villages have difficulty organizing big movements.)

Help for Millions Still Not On the Way

Click to enlarge.
Clay Bennett

Here is a good post from DarkSyde over at Kos:

If and when the day comes that a cute kid stands up and walks away from his wheelchair for good, the President and the right-wing culture of death are going to appear about as appealing as the theocrats who imprisoned Galileo.

Deconstructing David Brooks

Billmon hit this one out of the park so I stole the entire post!

Wittingly or unwittingly, David Brooks really captures the Orwellian spirit of the neocon approach to history. This is him on the News Hour last Friday, trying out the he-who-controls-the-past-controls-the-future gambit:

DAVID BROOKS: If you look at the jihadists, they had a victory in '79 by pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. They pushed the U.S. out of Lebanon. The pushed the Israelis out of Gaza and out of Lebanon. They're probably pushing the U.S. out of Iraq. They are on the march.

It's not that the things Brooks says are completely untrue (except for the '79 date, which is when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, not when they left.) It's that each of them contradicts -- some blatantly; others more subtly -- both the actual context of those events and the official party line at the time, as expounded by official sources and regurgitated in the paper Brooks works for.

Back in the day, for example, the fighters who forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan were known as the mujadeen, not the jihadis, and they were struggling to free their country from communist oppression -- not waging a holy war to recreate the Islamic Caliphate.

At the the time of Ronald Reagan's ill-fated expedition to Lebanon, the American people were told it was a temporary peacekeeping mission, not an attempt to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the country -- the kind of position that America might "get pushed out of." And when we left, we were told it was a "phased redeployment offshore," not a retreat in the face of the Islamist hordes.

Israel's withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon? Why, those were voluntary gestures towards peace -- or, alternatively, bold unilateral measures to extricate the Jewish state from unwinnable situations. But now we're told the Israelis didn't jump, they were pushed.

The same goes for Iraq, where the complex horrors of a civil war within a civil war are boiled down to an effort to "push" the United States out of a country it supposedly came to liberate, and where it still officially claims it will only remain "as long as necessary, and not one day longer."

Now these errors in the official record have all been rectified.

Finally, Brooks applies the fear stimulus (in a gentle way, admittedly, but then this is PBS.) He warns us that "they" (meaning, presumably, the armies of jihad) are "on the march" -- neatly conflating in one plural pronoun Shi'a and Sunni, religious and secular, Lebanese politician and Palestinian nationalist and Iraqi insurgent and Al Qaeda terrorist. They're all on the march, like the enemy storm trooper in an Ingsoc propaganda poster:

It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.

This is commentary only in the same sense that a front-page editorial in People's Daily on the counterrevolutionary capitalist conspiracy, circa 1965, counts as commentary. It does demonstrate, however, the neocon skill at constructing grand meta-narratives out of carefully selected pieces of reality, glued together with lies, distortions and apocalyptic rhetoric.

Brooks is actually one of the most effective practioners of the art because he's usually so low-key about it. He doesn't rant -- or rather he does, but typically in a mild-mannered, reasonable tone of voice, without the piercing shrieks and flying specks of spit found on the talk radio shows or the right-wing extremist blogs. Think of it as the talking head show approach to doublethink.

That doesn't, however, make it less dangerous -- just the opposite, in fact. When an establishment drone like David Brooks starts sounding like the speaker at a five-minute hate, but on Quaaludes, it shows that the neocon version of Minitrue is pulling out all the stops.
Posted by billmon at 12:32 PM

Triumph of the Authoritarians

John Dean in the Boston Globe writes:

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

snip

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Not Worth A Continental

Nicholas von Hoffman at The Nation talks about war and inflation.

Ask George Washington what he thinks about fighting a war on credit. Back in his day, Congress printed money to pay for the Revolutionary War but neglected to tax anybody to back up this funny money of theirs. The bills were called continentals and in due course they lost all their value, hence the once-popular expression, 'not worth a continental.'

I have been wondering when this issue would heat up. There are no free wars and we will have to pay for this one now or later. Asking America to go to War but not to pay for it was always a deeply irresponsible idea.

Johnson's and Nixon's Vietnam war deficits led directly to the inflation of the 70's peaking with a prime rate for borrowers of 20% on April 2, 1980. Another hidden cost so conveniently overlooked by the neocons is that a lot of war spending creates no return on investment. A billion dollars spent on a factory or a transporation system or a power plant or an environmental project produces returns in the form of goods, productivity, energy or clean air. A billion dollars spent on bombs produces...well, bombs.