LRB · Vol. 32 No. 22 · 18 November 2010

James Meek · Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity · LRB 18 February 2016
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james-meek/robin-hood-in-a-time-of-austerity

Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez.

So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be. It is they, the social category previously labelled ‘poor’, who are accused of living in big houses, wallowing in luxury and not needing to work, while those previously considered rich are redesignated as the ones who work terribly hard for fair reward or less, forced to support this new category of poor-who-are-considered-rich. In this version the sheriff of Nottingham runs a ruthless realm of plunder and political correctness, ransacking the homesteads of honest peasants for money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats.

In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with 11 children, living in a luxury house on the public purse. He’s sabotaging the sheriff of Nottingham’s wicked tax-gathering devices – speed cameras and parking meters. He’s on talk radio, denouncing inheritance tax. He’s winning elections.

[...]

Today, the key signifier is the phrase ‘hardworking people’. With this expression, right-wing politicians embrace the entire spectrum of employed people with property, from a struggling small-time café owner with a bank loan to Britain’s richest beneficiary of inherited wealth, the multibillionaire Duke of Westminster (who does have a job, looking after his money), and class them as peasants, put-upon smallholders clawing a living from the soil in the face of the sheriff’s cruel tax raids.

#Robin_des_bois #inversion #perversion #sans_vergogne

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Putinisation : Israel’s Putinisation · LRB 18 February 2016
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/adam-shatz/israels-putinisation

But the unbridled, insular nationalism of Netanyahu’s Israel is also reminiscent of Sisi’s Egypt and Erdoğan’s Turkey, where there is constant talk of foreign plots hatched in Washington and Brussels, and a toxic mix of resentment and entitlement vis-à-vis their Western patrons. As Diana Pinto suggests in Israel Has Moved (2013), the Jewish state has tended to see its neighbours as ‘so many vaulting poles with which to catapult itself into a peaceful because distant globalisation’. Economically, it has succeeded in escaping the region; politically, that goal has proved far more elusive. ‘Israel is now just another Arab regime,’ the Syrian poet Adunis once said to me, and the proposed legislation against ‘moles’ is scarcely different in kind, if not degree, from anti-NGO campaigns in Cairo. The repression of Jewish dissent is the latest phase of what Pinto describes as the ‘turning inward of a state in the process of its own ghettoising’. As if it preferred to remain in that ghetto, Israel has stubbornly carried on a colonial project at the risk of harming its relations with Europe and the United States, both of which are finally realising that Israel has no intention of making a genuine peace with the Palestinian people.

Benedict Anderson · Frameworks of Comparison · LRB 21 January 2016

►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/benedict-anderson/frameworks-of-comparison

▻http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/q/cov3802.jpg?1452347183

Benedict Anderson reflects on his intellectual formation

In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison’ was still somewhat limited. I don’t mean that comparisons were never made: they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences, only one department (Comparative Literature) uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork. Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison. The Political Science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called Comparative Government, to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were focused on Western Europe. This was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilisation based on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.

#Benedict_Anderson

Frameworks of Comparison
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/benedict-anderson/frameworks-of-comparison

The 35 years I spent as a professor of government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that theory, mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty dead – modernisation theory. Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong. In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me’ theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political #corruption ..

#Etats-Unis

A lire absolument, le dernier article de « Sy » Hersh dans la London Review of Books, « Military to military » :
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
Je tente un long résumé avec citations, mais ce serait plutôt à lire in extenso.

A partir de l’été 2013, des membres haut placés dans l’appareil militaire américain (notamment le chef de la DIA M. Flynn et le chef d’état-major M. Dempsey) commencent à s’alarmer des conséquences du programme de la CIA d’armement des « rebelles syriens » en collaboration avec les pétromonarchies et la Turquie. Selon leurs informations il renforcerait les groupes les plus radicaux (parmi lesquels al-Nusra et Da’ich) :

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Ces militaires américains, persuadés que dans ces conditions la chute d’Assad mènerait au chaos, vont tenter de convaincre l’administration Obama de changer de politique en Syrie ; mais en vain.

Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’.

Ils vont alors tenter de contre-balancer celle-ci, sans rentrer en franche dissidence vis à vis de Washington, en faisant parvenir du renseignement par des canaux indirects (des militaires allemands, israéliens et russes) à Damas :

So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive.

L’article se poursuit avec un paragraphe rappelant l’ambition partagée par l’administration G.W. Bush et Obama de renverser Assad depuis au moins 2003, avec les différentes actions entreprises, malgré une coopération sécuritaire de Damas appréciée par les cercles militaires et de renseignement américains (choses assez bien connues).
Ensuite Hersh balance une sacrée révélation : à partir de l’automne 2013, dans un contexte où l’effort financier turco-qataro-saoudien augmente et où l’ensemble de l’opération de déstabilisation d’Assad semble échapper aux Américains, ces militaires « dissidents » vont jouer un coup : en remplaçant la ligne d’approvisionnement principale libyenne des rebelles et des jihadistes en Syrie, par une ligne venue de Turquie, ils vont réussir à abaisser la qualité de l’armement obtenu par ceux-ci :

The CIA was approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’
The flow of US intelligence to the Syrian army, and the downgrading of the quality of the arms being supplied to the rebels, came at a critical juncture.

Par la suite en 2014, Brennan (directeur de la CIA) tente de reprendre la main dans ce maelström. Il réunit les chefs du renseignement des Etats « arabes sunnites » et leur demande de ne soutenir que l’opposition modérée. Il obtient un oui poli mais non suivi d’effet, tandis que la ligne générale de l’administration Obama reste la même :

Brennan’s message was ignored by the Saudis, the adviser said, who ‘went back home and increased their efforts with the extremists and asked us for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it turns out that we end up reinforcing the extremists.’

Et reste le problème des Turcs, moins faciles à manipuler, qui soutiennent à la fois al-Nusra et Da’ich :

But the Saudis were far from the only problem: American intelligence had accumulated intercept and human intelligence demonstrating that the Erdoğan government had been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was now doing the same for Islamic State. ‘We can handle the Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the Middle East is based on a form of mutually assured destruction between Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is Erdoğan’s dream. We told him we wanted him to shut down the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing into Turkey. But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire – and he did not realise the extent to which he could be successful in this.’

Suit un long exposé, d’une part sur les relations américano-russes, que certains du côté de ces « dissidents » perçoivent comme trop marquées du côté de Washington par une mentalité anti-russe anachronique venue de la guerre froide, et sur les raisons de la peur de la Russie du phénomène jihadiste, amplifiée depuis la mort de Kadhafi, d’autre part. Evoqué aussi le traitement médiatique hostile aux USA à l’intervention russe en Syrie.
Reprise du récit. Après l’attentat de novembre dernier en France et le bombardier russe abattu par la chasse turque, Hollande tente d’amener Obama à un rapprochement avec la Russie mais sans succès, la ligne d’Obama restant départ d’Assad, opposition à l’intervention russe en Syrie, soutien à la Turquie, et maintien de l’idée d’une réelle opposiotn modérée :

The Paris attacks on 13 November that killed 130 people did not change the White House’s public stance, although many European leaders, including François Hollande, advocated greater co-operation with Russia and agreed to co-ordinate more closely with its air force; there was also talk of the need to be more flexible about the timing of Assad’s exit from power. On 24 November, Hollande flew to Washington to discuss how France and the US could collaborate more closely in the fight against Islamic State. At a joint press conference at the White House, Obama said he and Hollande had agreed that ‘Russia’s strikes against the moderate opposition only bolster the Assad regime, whose brutality has helped to fuel the rise’ of IS. Hollande didn’t go that far but he said that the diplomatic process in Vienna would ‘lead to Bashar al-Assad’s departure … a government of unity is required.’ The press conference failed to deal with the far more urgent impasse between the two men on the matter of Erdoğan. Obama defended Turkey’s right to defend its borders; Hollande said it was ‘a matter of urgency’ for Turkey to take action against terrorists. The JCS adviser told me that one of Hollande’s main goals in flying to Washington had been to try to persuade Obama to join the EU in a mutual declaration of war against Islamic State. Obama said no. The Europeans had pointedly not gone to Nato, to which Turkey belongs, for such a declaration. ‘Turkey is the problem,’ the JCS adviser said.

Hersh s’appuie ensuite sur l’ambassadeur syrien en Chine pour évoquer la cas de la Chine qui soutient aussi Assad. L’occasion de mentionner le Parti islamique du Turkestan Oriental, allié d’al-Qaïda et soutenu par les services turcs, et qui offre à des combattants notamment Ouïghours l’occasion de mener le jihad en Syrie avant peut-être de retourner le pratiquer dans le Xinjiang ce qui inquiète Pékin :

Moustapha also brought up China, an ally of Assad that has allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria. China, too, is worried about Islamic State. ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang.

L’article se finit sur le sort de ces « dissidents ». Flynn se fera virer en 2014, tandis que Dempsey et les autres au sein de l’état-major, qui ont été moins insistants, resteront en poste.

General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA.

Dempsey finira par partir en retraite en 2015, mettant fin à cette « dissidence douce » au sein du Pentagone :

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said.

Conclusion :

Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdoğan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case. ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,’ the president told Erdoğan’s intelligence chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I reported in the LRB of 17 April 2014). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s support for it. The message was never listened to. Why not?

Le nouveau document de Seymour M. Hersh: Military to Military: US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive. It was clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.’

Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad.

[…]

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If you look at their behaviour, it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia ‘is not fighting’ IS. He added that America must ‘work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’ and ‘do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to fight the extremists.

Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan.

Adam Shatz · Magical Thinking about Isis ·
Adam Shatz
LRB 3 December 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/adam-shatz/magical-thinking-about-isis

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s. Même pas peur, they have declared with admirable defiance on posters, and on the walls of the place de la République. But the fear is pervasive, and it’s not confined to France. In the last few weeks alone, Islamic State has carried out massacres in Baghdad, Ankara and south Beirut, and downed a Russian plane with 224 passengers. It has taunted survivors with threats of future attacks, as if its deepest wish were to provoke violent retaliation.

Already traumatised by the massacres in January, France appears to be granting that wish. ‘Nous sommes dans la guerre,’ François Hollande declared, and he is now trying to extend the current state of emergency by amending the constitution. Less than 48 hours after the event, a new round of airstrikes was launched against Raqqa, in concert with Russia. With a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ‘outlaws’. In the unlikely event that France sends ground troops to Syria, it will have handed IS an opportunity it longs for: face to face combat with ‘crusader’ soldiers on its own soil.

How a Fabrication Differs from a Lie
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n08/mikkel-borch-jacobsen/how-a-fabrication-differs-from-a-lie

‘Was #Freud a liar?’ Ever since Frank Cioffi had the audacity to ask this question in 1973, it has continued to rock the world of psychoanalysis. Till then, things had been so simple. Children of the ‘Freudian century’, we had all learned to venerate in Sigmund Freud a man of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘flawless integrity’, as his loyal biographer Ernest Jones called him. How many times were we told that? It was his passion for truth that enabled him to confront the demons of his own unconscious and to lift the multisecular repression that weighed on sexuality, despite the ‘resistance’ of his patients and the attacks of his colleagues. It was this scientific probity, too, which made him acknowledge his error about the fantastic ‘scenes’ of incest and sexual molestation that his patients had been bringing to him, despite the stinging professional setback that this represented for him. In Freud, science coincided with the moral fibre of the scientist, whose edifying biography we never tired of reading: Anna O.’s miraculous ‘talking cure’, the break with Josef Breuer regarding sexuality, the solitary crossing of the desert, the painful abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’, the heroic self-analysis, the tearing away from the transference on Wilhelm Fliess, the stoicism in the face of his colleagues’ attacks.

It is a nice story, but we now know it to be nothing but a vast ‘legend’ (Henri Ellenberger). One after another, historians of psychoanalysis have come forward to show us that things did not happen in the way Freud and his authorised biographers told us. No, Anna O.’s ‘talking cure’ never was the ‘great therapeutic success’ later vaunted by Freud. No, Breuer in no way denied the role of sexuality in the neuroses. No, Freud was not as intellectually isolated as he claimed, and the reactions of his colleagues were far from being unfavourable at the beginning. On the contrary, many of them – notably his friend Fliess – had a deep interest in sexuality, including infantile sexuality. Wrong again that Freud’s patients ever spontaneously told him pseudo-memories of infantile sexual seduction: it was Freud himself who extorted these scenes of perversion, despite the patients’ vehement protests. Freud had lied to us; we could no longer trust him. The era of suspicion had begun. Suddenly, scholars started to notice that he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents. Some even go so far as to suggest – supreme lèse-majesté – that Sigmund cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law Minna. The defenders of psychoanalysis are indignant and speak of gutter-press journalism, of paranoia, of ‘Freud bashing’, but they are obviously on the defensive.

Too Weak, Too Strong
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n21/patrick-cockburn/too-weak-too-strong

.... a Russian air support won’t be enough to defeat IS and the other al-Qaida-type groups, because years of fighting the US, Iraqi and Syrian armies has given their fighters formidable military expertise. Tactics include multiple co-ordinated attacks by suicide bombers, sometimes driving armoured trucks that carry several tons of explosives, as well as the mass use of IEDs and booby traps. IS puts emphasis on prolonged training as well as religious teaching; its snipers are famous for remaining still for hours as they search for a target. IS acts like a guerrilla force, relying on surprise and diversionary attacks to keep its enemies guessing.

[...]

The Russian intervention in Syria, the greater involvement of Iran and the Shia powers, and the rise of the Syrian Kurds has not yet changed the status quo in Iraq and Syria, though it has the potential to do so. The Russian presence makes Turkish military intervention against the Kurds and the government in Damascus less likely. But the Russians, the Syrian army and their allies need to win a serious victory – such as capturing the rebel-held half of Aleppo – if they are to transform the civil war. Assad won’t want his experienced combat units to be caught up in the sort of street-by-street fighting described by the wounded soldiers in the hospitals. On the other hand, the Russian air campaign has an advantage over that of the Americans in that it has been launched in support of an effective regular army.

John Lanchester reviews ‘The Wright Brothers’ by David McCullough and ‘Elon Musk’ by Ashlee Vance · LRB 10 September 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/john-lanchester/lets-all-go-to-mars
▻http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/covers/cov3717.jpg?1440766273

The juxtaposition of the Wrights’ story with Musk’s suggests that America is thinking about innovation and new technologies, and perhaps that it deeply wants to believe in the new thing, to believe that the new inventions will be as consequential as the old ones proved to be.

très intéressante revue sur les deux sujets (les frères Wright puis Elon Musk)

#technologie #espace #aviation

What to do with the people who do make it across?

Since the civil war in Syria began in 2011, more than 12 million people have been displaced by the fighting, 4.1 million of whom have fled the country. The flow of refugees from Syria has been constant, but there have been two great surges in the past four years. The first was in the middle of 2013, when fighting intensified. That was when the Assad regime stepped up its attacks, the Arab League agreed to arm rebel groups, and a former branch of al-Qaida emerged as Isis. Between March and September that year, a million people fled the country – as many as had left in the two years before.

▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/daniel-trilling/what-to-do-with-the-people-who-do-make-it-across
#migrations #asile #réfugiés #Syrie #réfugiés_syriens

Some Tips for the Long-Distance Traveller

A Kurdish friend of mine in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq recently posted an image of a hand-drawn diagram on his Facebook page. With little arrows and stick figures and pictures of a train and boat or two, the diagram shows how to get from Turkey to the German border in twenty easy steps. After you’ve made the thousand-mile trip to western Turkey, the journey proper begins with a taxi to Izmir on the coast. An arrow points to the next stage: a boat across the Aegean to ‘a Greek island’, costing between €950 and €1200. Another boat takes you to Athens. A train – looking like a mangled caterpillar – leads to Thessaloniki. Walking, buses and two more worm-like trains take you across Macedonia to Skopje, and then through Serbia to Belgrade. A stick figure walks across the border into Hungary near the city of Szeged. Then it’s on to Budapest by taxi, and another taxi across the whole of Austria. At the bottom of the page a little blue stick figure is jumping in the air waving a flag. He has arrived in Germany, saying hello to Munich, after a journey of some three thousand miles, taking perhaps three weeks, at a total cost of $2400.

http://cdn.lrb.co.uk/assets/edillus/abdu01_3719_01.jpg

Plus loin dans le texte :

Not all smugglers toil at the dirt tracks on the frontiers between nations. Nabil is a Swedish-Iraqi whose main talent is marketing. His job has been made difficult lately: who needs a smuggler if they can find their own way to Europe? He made the decision to cater for more exclusive clients, those who want to spare themselves and their families the hardship of a long trek through the Balkans.

#smugglers #passeurs

Palestinian Women, Children Stop IDF Soldier Detaining a Minor - Diplomacy and Defense - Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.673469

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.673470!/image/3122644660.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_474/3122644660.jpg

L’armée israélienne en concurrence avec #Gorafi:

According to the army, the youth was throwing stones at the troops, who did not realize he was a minor.

#mineurs #Palestine #Israël #impunité #Israel

In Sofia

Djaved says he has learned that you can haggle with a policeman for anything in Sofia. At 10.15 on the morning we met it was already over 30ºC, but we went for a walk anyway. I grew up wandering these streets after school. Yuch Bunar, as the area near the Central Market Hall was once called, has traditionally been the home of migrants, Jews, traders, musicians. It is the most culturally and historically dense part of the city, and the buildings haven’t changed much since the late 19th century. They haven’t been intentionally preserved – just left undisturbed. The area has a synagogue, a mosque, one Catholic and two Orthodox churches, all working, all in one square mile, all peeling stucco in different shades of ochre, just minutes away from Parliament Square, where the buildings are in pale grey stone: the council of ministers, the presidential palace, the national bank.

Djaved escaped one war in Afghanistan, but there is another one in Bulgaria: the immigrants’ war, he calls it, ‘because you have to fight to be an immigrant.’

▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/07/15/neda-neynska/in-sofia
#Bulgarie #migration #asile #réfugiés

Excellent article (mais très long) dans la London Review of books : « The hijackers » par Hugh Roberts.
L’article se présente comme un passage en revue fouillé de l’histoire politique de la Syrie du début de l’époque mandataire à nos jours pour critiquer la thèse de J.P. Filiu selon laquelle l’"Etat profond" syrien (ou les nouveaux « Mamelouks ») a produit l’Etat islamique pour pirater la révolution syrienne afin d’assurer sa survie.
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers

Hugh Roberts reviews ‘From Deep State to Islamic State’ by Jean-Pierre Filiu, ‘Syrian Notebooks’ by Jonathan Littell, ‘The Rise of Islamic State’ by Patrick Cockburn and ‘Isis’ by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan · LRB 16 July 2015
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers

Contexte : le fameux document déclassifié de la DIA ►http://seenthis.net/messages/372860

Ainsi le service du renseignement américain a vu l’Etat Islamique venir et était non seulement détendu à cette perspective, mais, paraît-il, positivement intéressé. La formule précise utilisée dans le paragraphe 8c est intrigante. Elle ne parle pas de ‘ la possibilité que l’Isis puisse établir une principauté salafiste ’ mais de ‘ la possibilité d’établissement ’ d’une principauté salafiste. [...]

Un deuxième élément de preuve est une carte préparée par le lieutenant-colonel Ralph Peters de l’Académie de guerre des États-Unis et publiée dans le Journal des Forces armées en Juin 2006. Elle montre un « Nouveau #Moyen-Orient » qui, tel qu’imaginé par le colonel Peters, contrarierait la plupart des gouvernements actuels de la région.

Ce qui est frappant c’est que, à la place de l’Irak et de la Syrie, il suggère qu’il pourrait y avoir trois états, un état "arabe chiite" s’étendant jusqu’à Bagdad, un« Irak sunnite », puis « la Syrie », les deux derniers étant dépouillés de leur régions kurdes, maintenant incluses dans un nouvel état de « Kurdistan libre ». En elle-même la carte ne prouve rien au-delà de l’imagination d’un homme et le fait qu’un journal l’a trouvé assez intéressante pour l’imprimer.

Mais elle suggère que depuis neuf ans la partition de l’Irak est envisagée par les hauts responsables américains comme une possibilité. Avec les progrès que l’EI a réalisés au cours de la dernière année, des discussions sur une partition, à la fois de l’Irak et de la Syrie, se font de plus en plus.

Ce que nous pouvons en faire n’est, bien sûr, pas clair.

À un extrême, les théoriciens de la conspiration diront que ça va dans le sens de leurs affirmations, à savoir que les puissances occidentales ont délibérément créé le chaos pour des raisons personnelles inavouables. À l’autre extrémité du spectre, on peut émettre l’hypothèse que le document de la DIA peut avoir été lu par quatre personnes sans importance à Washington et été ignoré par tout le monde. Entre les deux, en affichant plus de respect pour la DIA, nous pourrions imaginer autre chose : la possibilité que, en 2012, les services de renseignement américains et d’autres services occidentaux ont vu l’Isis autant qu’ils virent Jabhat al-Nusra et d’autres groupes djihadistes, comme des auxiliaires utiles dans la dynamique anti-Assad, et pouvaient envisager sa prise de contrôle du nord-est de la Syrie comme un développement utile sans implications préoccupantes. Si l’État islamique a échappé à toute influence que les services de renseignement ont initialement cherché à avoir sur lui et s’il ne roule que pour lui-même, cela signifie que des personnes ont joué avec le feu.

Je ne prétends pas savoir ce qu’est la vérité. Mais il n’y a pas besoin de prouver des intentions malignes de la part des puissances occidentales. La théorie la plus charitable à notre disposition, la théorie de l’histoire ’qui foire éternellement de manière récurrente ’, convient assez bien. Si une théorie plus sophistiquée est nécessaire, je suggère que nous nous rappelions l’évaluation de C. Wright Mills quand il disait que la politique américaine était faite par des « réalistes cinglés », des gens qui étaient des réalistes accomplis quant à la façon de promouvoir leurs carrières à l’intérieur du Beltway et d’incorrigibles cinglés quand on en venait à la formulation de la politique étrangère.

Patrick Cockburn · Why join Islamic State ? · LRB 2 July 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/patrick-cockburn/why-join-islamic-state?hq_e=el&hq_m=3818645&hq_l=9&hq_v=61a0624cf7

La #corruption et l’#arbitraire de l’""""#élite"""" moyen-orientale parmi les garants de la pérennité de l’#ISIS,

He told the story of his former leader or emir, an Iraqi Kurd with the nom de guerre Abu Abbas al-Kurdistani, who had recently been killed in battle. Faraj asked him why he had joined Islamic State and Abu Abbas replied that he had been imprisoned by the Kurdistan Regional Government for four years without a fair trial. ‘Corruption and torture,’ Faraj said, ‘had pushed him to find any organisation that gives him the opportunity for taking revenge. Our emir’s pain was similar to ours. We all fight as a reaction to the tyranny and injustice we had known before. Islamic State is the best option for oppressed people in the Middle East.’

The capture of Tal Abyad by the Kurds may well lead to a fresh wave of speculation that Islamic State is going into decline. But, like most of the other participants in the civil wars in Iraq and Syria, the self-declared caliphate is too well rooted to disappear.

Chase Madar · Short Cuts · LRB 2 July 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/chase-madar/short-cuts

Représentants (personnes et institutions) théoriques des droits humains agissant ou prenant position en faveur de la violence létale,

Harold Koh is the former dean of Yale Law School and an expert in human rights law. As the State Department’s senior lawyer between 2009 and 2013, he provided the Obama administration with the legal basis for assassination carried out by drones. And despite having written academic papers backing a powerful and restrictive War Powers Act, he made the legal case for the Obama administration’s right to make war on Libya without bothering to get congressional approval. Koh, who has now returned to teaching human rights law, is not the only human rights advocate to call for the use of lethal violence. Indeed, the weaponisation of human rights – its doctrines, its institutions and, above all, its grandees – has been going on in the US for more than a decade.

Take Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US allies into providing more troops for Obama’s escalated but unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. This last argument wasn’t successful in 2012, though she was at it again recently when interviewed on Charlie Rose. Or there’s Sarah Sewall, another former director of the Carr Centre, who was responsible for the material on human rights in the reworked US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Or Michael Posner, the founder of Human Rights First, now a business professor at NYU, who, as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour in Obama’s first term, helped bury the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations to investigate atrocities committed during Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. Or John Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe.

[...]

Human rights organisations have also been at it. Although it’s the policy of Human Rights Watch not to comment on matters of jus ad bellum – whether or not a war should be waged – in 2011 the UN resolution authorising military force in Libya was warmly endorsed by the outfit’s executive director and top Washington lobbyist. Just days after airstrikes began against the Qaddafi government, a Human Rights Watch researcher called Corinne Dufka called for ‘nothing less than the type of unified and decisive action the UN Security Council has brought to bear in Libya’ to be employed in Côte d’Ivoire in an article published in Foreign Policy. Amnesty International consistently backed US military operations in Afghanistan, which it seemed to view as a Peace Corps programme with soldiers attached.

#droits_humains #états-unis

Scott Ritter · ‘We ain’t found shit’ · LRB 2 July 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n13/scott-ritter/we-aint-found-shit

The facts appear to support Iran’s position. Countries subjected to intrusive no notice inspections have to be confident that the process isn’t actually an intelligence-led operation aimed at undermining their legitimate interests. The nuclear framework agreement with Iran doesn’t require the IAEA to accept anything Iran declares at face value, but none of its protocols justifies no notice inspections of military sites. Iran signed the Joint Plan of Action in 2013, and has abided by the verification conditions it required without incident. This track record should count in its favour, especially when you consider the dubious results of no notice inspections since they were first carried out in 1991.

#AIEA #Iran #nucléaire

Seymour M. Hersh : The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

(pas encore lu)