company:london review of books

Algeria and the American Black Panther Party
►https://africasacountry.com/2018/07/algeria-and-the-american-black-panther-party

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/07/01233231/Cropped-Magnum-PAR167089-e1530502362909.jpg

In the 1970s, Algiers served as refuge to African Americans who confronted US racism with force and had to flee the country. Some Panthers hijacked planes.

Islam’s New ‘Native Informants’ | by Nesrine Malik | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

▻https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/07/islams-new-native-informants

Returning from Lebanon and Egypt in 2003, Edward Said wrote an angry dispatch in the London Review of Books on how the Iraq War as reported on Arabic TV channels portrayed a different conflict from the one reported by the American media, in which journalists were “as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with.” He argued that the stream of Western commentary “has obscured the negligence of the military and policy experts who planned it and now justify it.” The misguided belief that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans with glee after a period of aerial bombardment, a fundamental flaw in the planning of the military mission, he pinned squarely on the out-of-touch exiled Iraqi opposition and the two Middle East experts who, at the time, held the most sway over US foreign policy in the region: Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.

Said dismissed Bernard Lewis as an Orientalist, a generalist, and an ideologue. But the Lebanese-born Fouad Ajami was damned in fewer words: he was a “native informant.” By that was meant one who deploys “we,” Said wrote, “as an imperial collectivity which, along with Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything and therefore deserve ‘our’ contempt and hostility.” In a profile of Ajami written for The Nation that appeared at almost the same time, Adam Shatz observed that Ajami’s failure to predict the Saudi conveyor-belt of radicalization that brought about 9/11 (so focused was he on “the menace of Saddam and the treachery of Arafat) still had not dented his Middle East expert credentials as far as the US media were concerned. “America was going to war with Muslims,” Shatz wrote, “and a trusted native informant was needed.”

Fifteen calamitous years later, the scorn that the late Ajami received at the time has been vindicated. But the term “native informant” has become a troubling one. As a derogatory description of an indigenous person considered a collaborator with the colonial or invading power, it sits too closely for comfort to slurs such as “house slave” and its derivatives. In the discipline of postcolonial studies, “native informant” was once useful in understanding the way certain cultural brokers from former colonies could benefit from helping more powerful Western authorities objectify their people. In an essay on the Lebanese-American academic Evelyne Accad, the scholar Dorothy Figueira described native informants as “disciplinary gatekeepers providing an authoritative version of history for the upper classes (reformers or nationalists), and the West.” But in a world where these “authoritative versions” are not simply academic, but can also be the ideological underpinnings of military aggression, the native informant’s role is that of enabler.

Bee Wilson reviews ‘The Littlehampton Libels’ by Christopher Hilliard · London Review of Books 8 February 2018
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n03/bee-wilson/merely-a-warning-that-a-noun-is-coming

The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of #microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in #Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’.

This is a book about #morality and #class, about the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these poison pen letters – written in language that was as eccentric as it was obscene – to ‘catch the accents of the past’. The Littlehampton Libels is about a battle between two women who were members of only the second generation in Britain to benefit from compulsory elementary education, women for whom the written word was a new and exhilarating weapon.

Hilliard asks what it was like to live in a society where ‘nice’ women had to pretend that they were ignorant of all #profanity. Melissa Mohr claims in her excellent book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) that the British started to swear more during and after the First World War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used for emphasis, but Brophy and Partridge found that obscenity was so over-used among the military in the Great War that if a soldier wanted to express emotion he wouldn’t swear. ‘Thus if a sergeant said, “Get your —ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.’

The Untreatable
London Review of Books
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n02/gavin-francis/the-untreatable

« #grippe_espagnole »

The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was German flu. Poles called it the Bolshevik Disease and the Persians thought the British were responsible (Spinney writes about its devastating effect on the city of Mashed, where it probably arrived with a Russian soldier from the north).

As to the original source of the pandemic, there are three chief candidates: Kansas poultry farms, the army barracks of Etaples in northern France, and the Shansi province in China.

#grippe

MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic US-Backed War in Yemen
▻https://fair.org/home/msnbc-yemen-russia-coverage-2017

In 2017, MSNBC ran 1,385 broadcasts that mentioned “Russia,” “Russian” or “Russians.” Yet only 82 broadcasts used the words “Yemen,” “Yemeni” or “Yemenis” in the entire year.

Moreover, the majority of the 82 MSNBC broadcasts that mentioned Yemen did so only once and in passing, often simply as one nation in a longer list of nations targeted by President Trump’s travel ban.

Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the US-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.

Netanyahu Tells European Leaders Concern for Palestinian Rights Is “Crazy”
Robert Mackey | July 19 2017,
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/07/19/netanyahu-tells-european-leaders-concern-palestinian-rights-crazy

Netanyahu’s private description of Israel as part of Europe, and the recent increase in pressure on Israel from the E.U. calls to mind the analysis of the historian Tony Judt , in an interview published in The London Review of Books shortly after his death in 2010.

Asked by Kristina Boži?, “Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?” Judt’s reply is worth quoting at length:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk.

However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.

Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes.

If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed.

People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem.

Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/27/hershs-new-syria-revelations-buried-from-view

Hersh’s new investigation was paid for by the London Review of Books, which declined to publish it. This is almost disturbing as the events in question.

What is emerging is a media blackout so strong that even the London Review of Books is running scared. Instead, Hersh’s story appeared yesterday in a German publication, Welt am Sonntag. Welt is an award-winning newspaper, no less serious than the New Yorker or the LRB. But significantly Hersh is being forced to publish ever further from the centres of power whose misinformation his investigations are challenging.

#Hersh #Syrie #médias