[Debate] (Fwd) Is Qaddafi's overthrow a blow or a boon? (Pham Binh)

Mon Aug 29 17:39:06 BST 2011

No amount of "innovation" on the part of the pro-rebel left can hide
racism of the Libyan rebels that even the pro-imperialist MSM has
stopped apologizing for.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/au-libya-rebels-may-be-indiscriminately-killing-black-workers-mistaking-them-for-mercenaries/2011/08/29/gIQAmNRQnJ_story.html>
AU: Libya rebels may be indiscriminately killing black workers,
mistaking them for mercenaries

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, August 29, 11:32 AM

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The chairman of the African Union says Libyan
rebels may be indiscriminately killing black people in Libya because
they have confused innocent migrant workers with mercenaries.

Chairman Jean Ping told reporters Monday that this is one of the
reasons the AU is refusing to recognize the National Transitional
Council as the country’s interim government.

He said “We need clarification because the NTC seems to confuse black
people with mercenaries .... They are killing normal workers.”

Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council appears to have secured
Libya’s capital after a week of fierce fighting with loyalists to Col.
Moammar Gadhafi.

He said there was no doubt the council now controlled the capital city
and called on both sides to “stop the killing.”

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Peter Waterman
<peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, Neville, I would like to assure you that I do not confine
> 'paleolithic' to Marxist prisms (or prisons). It is just that this is where
> I come from and am therefore most sensitive to. But, sure, Marxism, like
> everyone and everything, is in need of emancipation in the light of
> everything - hegemonic and anti-hegemonic - that has occurred in the 150
> years or so since he wrote.
>
> And I find your general argument both innovatory and forceful. And expressed
> in the mode necessary to advancing dialogue on the grave issues under
> discussion.
>
> Pw
>
> On 29-8-2011 17:31, Neville Adams wrote:
>
> I am puzzled by your use of the term ‘felicity’.  I am happy with my
> arguments.  Do you mean veracity?  Yes, there needs to be a move to the
> generation of principles vis-à-vis intervention in other states, preferably
> ones that stem from a democratised international legal order, where, in
> short hand, democratised refers to bottom up law formation.   In the interim
> we try to squeeze as much out of the normative potential of what exists in
> relation to international law and the states supposedly bound by them, to
> further progressive ends.   And in that interim, when shit happens and
> others prefer to pontificate about the lack of ideal circumstances, it is
> better to run with that normative potential knowing full well that  the
> unfinished business of the enlightenment means that western states stare
> back at us Janus faced reflecting the reality that their ostensible,
> ‘universal’ values of freedom, equality and such like can be undergirded by
> repressive particularisms.   There is a chance then that intervention in
> support of the Libyan people might turn into an imperialistic relationship.
>  However, having asked for help -  and we should not be so patronising, or
> hubristic, as to believe that they did not know the risks - it is, in the
> first instance, up to the Libyan people to ensure that that does not
> happen.   Our role – those living in the west  who supported the
> intervention – is to try to ensure that requested intervention does not trip
> over into dependency revisited.
>
>
>
> Peter’s point was, as I understand it, about  trying to comprehend the world
> still through the prism of a Palaeolithic  Marxism.   My point is that
> intervention in support of those with emancipative aims who request it has
> occurred before.  The absence of a fully worked out set of guiding
> principles, international laws and inter-state governance arrangements
> should not be a barrier to responding positively to that, which I think it
> is for you.   So to your last point about whether or not other means had
> been exhausted.    People who live under a regime in which violence of
> differing sorts is insinuated into almost every  aspect of society,
> particularly their relationship to the state, do not, when they rise up
> against this, initiate the violence.  You can’t seriously be suggesting that
> they should have first had some form of ‘indaba’ about the best way
> forward?   That very act itself would have been interpreted as an act of
> violence against the state by the Gaddafi regime, and dealt with violently.
>
>
>
> You are not the only one concerned about the lack of an adequate framework
> within which to assess the claims for help.  I’m simply not hamstrung by
> that absence.
>
>
>
> Neville
>
>
>
> From: debate-list-bounces at fahamu.org [mailto:debate-list-bounces at fahamu.org]
> On Behalf Of Riaz K Tayob
> Sent: 28 August 2011 17:20
> To: Debate is a listserve that attempts to promote information and analyses
> of interest to the independent left in South and Southern Africa
> Subject: Re: [Debate] (Fwd) Is Qaddafi's overthrow a blow or a boon? (Pham
> Binh)
>
>
>
> I do not know why you see this as condemnatory hubris when I am quite
> willing to change the label of container, while you continue to avoid my
> points on content regarding felicity to the arguments made in support of the
> intervention/solidarity (insert appropriate term here) actions.
>
> It is precisely because I am willing to engage on these issues, and I am not
> unresponsive to the idealism that drives the will to intervene, that I
> question the felicity of the arguments made. Which I find quite wanting. As
> Peter put it in his crit of Yoshie, there is a need to move to
> generalisation of issues and principles so that some obligation to
> compliance can be made. Arguments like Achcar's or Devan's are not
> convincing.
>
> On your question, oppressed peoples deserve our support. But no
> uncritically. And the bar is set much higher when we make common cause with
> imperialism. It simply will not do to say that something positive is being
> done so we must support it, because of the old hard-learned addage - beware
> foreigners bearing gifts (and we should look a gift horse in the mouth).
> That the brutalities we see in far too many third world countries has
> neither a principled basis nor even a useful procedure (the SC is about
> threats to international peace) to address it is worrying. And it is
> possible to have the development of laws on this through state practice if
> not through treaty. But the interventionists or neo-humanitarians steer
> clear of this.
>
> Your comparison, in your question to me, is context speficic in the cold war
> or during the hey days of self determination and decolonisation (or the
> process to complete independence). This is where PeterW points to Yoshie
> make imminent sense, as things have changed and moved on. And this is the
> fork in the road where we can (and do differ). Unlike the neohumanitarians
> (sic) and Chomsky (in interventions) the choice over a brutal dictator and
> imperialism should lead to support for the latter is not as obvious.
>
> The problem with responding to oppressed people calling for help with a
> military response is one of substance and procedure. Is violence the correct
> means? Have other means been exhausted? Who decides? And how do they decide?
> We do lack the laws and the means for this but in the context where the same
> people who write state practice in pre-emptive war and Devan's any means
> necessary are not the sort of folk to be entrusted with such unilaterally!
> Which brings us to the point of what are the principles that guide the move
> to justify Libyan intervention aside from uniqueness?
>
> The lack of felicity to the arguments presented sets a dangerous precedent
> for parochial interpretation when in any event whatever principles are
> derived would be subject to paradiastole.
>
>
>
> On 2011/08/28 07:04 PM, Neville Adams wrote:
>
> There you go again, Riaz,  exercising a condemnatory hubris through
> reductive labelling – ‘interventionists, ‘neo-humanitarians’, and so
> forth.   Having read your responses so far to the Libyan issue, I am only
> too aware of ‘the complexity of the paranoid politics that foreign
> interference breeds in local politics.’   I seem to recall a vigorous call
> for foreign intervention of differing sorts – disinvestment, boycotts etc .
> – against apartheid South Africa.  Was there not military intervention by
> proxy on the part of the USSR and its satellites through the arming and
> training of the ANC?   In the case of Zimbabwe, I remember the UK being
> caricatured – quite rightly - as a toothless old lion for not using brute
> force to end the UDI.   In the history of liberation struggles, it would
> appear then that some of those struggling against oppressive regimes
> actively sought supporting  intervention by others.   So, given the scenario
> of the oppressed rising up and calling for help, under what circumstances
> would such a type of intervention be unacceptable?
>
>
>
> Neville
>
>
>
> From: debate-list-bounces at fahamu.org [mailto:debate-list-bounces at fahamu.org]
> On Behalf Of Riaz K Tayob
> Sent: 28 August 2011 09:44
> To: pbond at mail.ngo.za; Debate is a listserve that attempts to promote
> information and analyses of interest to the independent left in South and
> Southern Africa
> Subject: Re: [Debate] (Fwd) Is Qaddafi's overthrow a blow or a boon? (Pham
> Binh)
>
>
>
> Sure this makes sense, but has not been much in evidence IMHO on this list.
>
> Problem is that some of the Libya interventionists on this list have not
> being willing to embrace the complexity of the paranoid politics that
> foreign interference breeds in local politics... and this relates to all
> sorts of interference, from World Bank loans and neo-liberalism through to
> betting on one or other candidate.
>
> To me it seems that this would mean eschewing the simplicity of anti-statism
> in third countries with a more sophisticated, but no less critical, position
> (many third world elites do aspire to be part of the globalised elite). And
> this is not to be reductionistic in critique - which goes to the heart of my
> characterisation of interventionists and the shortcomings in arguments in
> support of the intervention.
>
> If one adds Binh's point to the equation one can see how foreign forces
> undermined progressive movements from Egypt to Libya. This was the case even
> in countries where it is reasonably foreseeable that the sceptre of foreign
> involvement would haunt and undermine the progressive movements. In some
> places there is the implicit view that international solidarity is the
> monopoly of the West, which is not acceptable.
>
> If the quote you like from Binh is viewed as valid, it should not be limited
> to peoples revolutions only. One would then also have to look at issues like
> the Meghrahi case, which as an indictment of the Collective North of an
> order of magnitude that is not even permitted public gaze, not even by
> neohumanitarian interventionists. But then the challenge is how does one
> integrate this level of sophisticated brutality by the Collective North into
> the assessments which are further complicated by Q's idiotic and brutal
> actions?
>
> On 2011/08/28 11:16 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
> (This makes sense to me: "We in the West need to do what we can to keep the
> hands of our rulers off of other people’s revolutions, which means taking a
> stand against imperialist intervention even when it is disguised as aid to a
> beleaguered rebellion.")
>
> August 27, 2011
>
> Qaddafi’s Overthrow: a “Blow to the Arab Spring”?
>
>
>
> By Pham Binh
>
>
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-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>