Fellows and Fellow Travelers:
I thought/hope that this reference to Bandung might interest you,
might suggest ways that engaging the history Prashad is offering
provides us with new lenses with which to view the contemporary world.
Peter
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Subject: [DEBATE] : Re-Reading Ahmadinejad: Towards a Neo-Bandung
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Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:22:26 -0400
From: Michael K. Dorsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Food for deeper consideration...
Begin forwarded message:
Ahmadinejad's message to the world
By Mark LeVine
Ahmadinejad blames "certain big powers" for the plight of a large
share of humanity, but
his own government's repressive policies have left him open to
criticism [GALLO/GETTY]
It was quite a week for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.
First he faced down the president of Columbia University and a host
of hostile questioners in Harlem.
Then he headed down to Midtown Manhattan, where for 45 minutes he
held the world's attention at the United Nations, before heading
farther south, to Caracas, Venezuela, for talks with his close
ally, President Hugo Chavez.
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Local papers, such as the Daily News and The New York Post,
featured headlines announcing that "The Evil has Landed" and
lambasting the "Mad Iran Prez" for his past denials of the
Holocaust, refusal to unequivocally renounce a quest for nuclear
weapons, and call to have Israel "wiped off the map" (an inaccurate
translation of the Persian "bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad,"
which is better - but less violently and therefore less usefully -
rendered in English as "erased from the page of time" or "fate").
Even Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University,
introduced him with an unprecedented - and to the minds of many
academics, not to mention Iranians, uncouth - verbal attack,
accusing him of being little more than a "petty dictator".
In its critiques of Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia, the
mainstream US press focused most of its attention on Ahmadinejad's
tendentious claim that "there are no homosexuals in Iran" (belied
by an evening stroll through Tehran's famous Daneshjoo Park), and
his attempt to redefine his position on the Holocaust (it happened,
but more research is needed to know its true extent).
At the UN, his criticism of "widespread human rights violations"
elicited the expected derisive response in light of his own
government's increasingly repressive policies, while his
declaration that the nuclear case against Iran "is closed"
suggested, to most commentators, continued intransigence by Iran in
the face of supposedly universal opposition to its nuclear programme.
Discourteous treatment
Few commentators considered how Ahmadinejad's words were heard
outside of the US media circus.
And those who did, such as Timothy Rutton of the LA Times, focused
purely on the reaction in the Muslim world, arguing that, as a
"totalitarian demagogue", Ahmadinejad gained legitimacy because of
the discourteous treatment by Columbia's president.
Ahmadinejad speaks to a wider audience
than just his western listeners [Reuters]
Rutton wrote: "Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake,
because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is
scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its
courtesies as core social virtues."
"To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered;
Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained."
Underlying Rutton's argument is the still-widespread belief, whose
roots lie deep in Europe and America's histories as imperial
powers, that Muslims and the other formerly colonised peoples value
"honour", "pride" and "hospitality" far more than they do issues of
substance.
Indeed, they remain incapable of making well-reasoned and
documented criticisms of a West, and the United States in
particular, that remains by definition technologically,
politically, and morally superior to the developing world.
'Poverty and deprivation'
It's no wonder, then, that almost no one in the American media
focused on the substantive claims of Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN.
Chief among them were his argument regarding the "alarming
situation of poverty and deprivation".
"Let me draw your attention to some data issued by the United
Nations," he said, before calling to the attention of the world's
leaders the fact that close to one billion people live on less than
$1-a-day and that there is a rapidly increasing gap between the
world's rich and poor.
He mentioned the continued disgraceful figures for infant
mortality, schooling and related human development indicators in
the developing world.
Perhaps wanting to be courteous, Ahmadinejad blamed "certain big
powers" for the plight of a large share of humanity - he might have
added that according to UN estimates almost half the world lives on
less than $2 per day.
But he didn't need to name names; most of the developing world,
including the Muslim world, share his belief that their plight is
linked to a world economic system whose goal, for more than half a
millennium, has been to exploit the peoples and resources of the
rest of the world for the benefit of the more advanced countries of
the West.
Few considered how Ahmadinejad's words were
heard outside of the US media circus [AFP]
That is precisely why so many people in the developing world remain
opposed to Western-sponsored globalisation, which for most critics,
including in the Arab/Muslim world, is little more than imperialism
dressed up in the rhetoric of "free markets" and "liberal democracy".
It is this much wider audience, from the favelas of Rio De Janeiro
and the shanty towns of Lagos as much as the slums of Casablanca,
Sadr City or Cairo, to whom Ahmadinejad was speaking.
His discourse was strikingly similar to that of his biggest ally,
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who in his speech before the
assembly last year had fewer qualms (perhaps because he's neither
Arab nor Muslim) about pointing fingers at whom he considers
responsible for the sorry shape of so much of the world.
Hoisting Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival above his head, he
exclaimed that "the hegemonic pretensions of US imperialism ... put
at risk the very survival of humankind".
America, not Iran, Chavez argued, is "the greatest threat looming
over our planet".
The Ahmadinejad-Chavez axis has been compared by American
politicians such as Florida Republican Congressman Connie Mack to
the relationship between Fidel Castro and Russia.
Such analogies are far off the mark.
A more accurate historical comparison would be to the relationship
between Egypt's Gemal Abdel Nasser and India's Jawaharlal Nehru,
when both came together at the Bandung conference in 1955 to
attempt to build a coherent bloc of nations that could protect its
interests against those of the two major superpowers, the US and
the Soviet Union.
'Human underdogs'
Writing after attending the Bandung Conference, the American
novelist Richard Wright exclaimed that it was a meeting of "the
despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed - in short, the
underdogs of the human race".
It was this shared experience of oppression that grounded the
"Bandung Spirit", which leaders such as Nasser used to develop the
"pan-" ideologies (-Arab, -African, -American, -Islamic) that
proved a thorn in the side of US policymakers for much of the Cold
war.
The difference between Chavez and Ahmadinejad and their "Third
World" predecessors, is, in a word, oil.
Iran and Venezuela possess the third- and seventh-largest oil
reserves in the world, totaling well over 200 billion barrels -
that's not much less than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.
At the UN General Assembly, Ahmadinejad
spoke for 45 minutes [GALLO/GETTY]
The two countries will earn well over $80bn in revenues this year
alone.
As important, both countries possess non-oil sectors that are
surprisingly robust, according to many estimates, for the majority
of both Iran's and Venezuela's Gross Domestic Product.
This provides both countries with billions of dollars to spend on
foreign aid, as demonstrated by Ahmadinejad's stopover in Bolivia,
where he pledged $1bn in Iranian aid and development to the poverty
stricken country.
US policymakers' view of the world through the "you're either with
us or against us" prism divides the globe into those who support
the US and Europe (and the "West" more broadly), and those who
support al-Qaeda and "Islamofascism", a term which has been created
precisely to ensure that Americans conflate Osama bin Laden with
Ahmadinejad, and both with Hitler.
But few people outside of the West buy this comparison, or the
larger black-and-white world-view it reflects.
Instead, in Africa and Latin America, Ahmadenijad's argument that
"humanity has had a deep wound on its tired body caused by impious
powers for centuries" resonates far more deeply than George Bush's
hollow-sounding calls for democracy and "ending tyranny".
Colonial rule
The West advises Africa to "get over" colonialism, but the pain of
colonial rule is still felt by those suffering under the policies
imposed by the IMF and/or the World Bank, or from the continued
subsidisation of American and European agribusiness while their
countries are flooded with below-market wheat, soy or corn.
It is to those people whom Ahmadinejad promised - in language that
strikingly mirrors US President Bush's often religiously-hued
speeches - that "the era of darkness will end" with the "dawn of
the liberation of, and freedom for, all humans".
Americans may not like Ahmadinejad's or Chavez's internal politics,
ideological orientations, or foreign policies.
But for most of the third world, which is tired of centuries of
domination by the West, the two leaders are a breath of fresh air,
who are coming not as conquerors, but as comrades.
They are free of the condescending "civilising mission" that, from
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt to the US invasion of Iraq, always
seem to include war, occupation, and the appropriation of strategic
natural resources under foreign control as part of their mandate.
And because of this, most of the citizens of the developing world,
rightly or wrongly, couldn't care less about Ahmadinejad's
positions on Israel, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons, never mind
homosexuals, none of which affect them directly.
They care only that he is sticking-it-to their old colonial or Cold
war masters, and offering "respect", "friendship" and billions of
dollars in aid with no strings attached.
Americans, Europeans and Israelis can fret about it all they want,
but it will not change this reality.
Only a reorientation of the world economy towards real
sustainability and equality will dampen his appeal, and that's not
likely to happen soon.
Which means that Americans will be hearing a lot more of
Ahmadinejad and leaders like him in the future.
The question is, will they be listening?
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC
Irvine in California, US, and author and editor of half-a-dozen
books, including Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the
Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005) and the forthcoming Heavy Metal
Islam: Rock, Religion and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam
(Random House/Verso) and An Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens
of History (Zed Books). He is a regular commentator on Al Jazeera's
The Listening Post. www.culturejamming.org
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