Circle of 13: 09 July 2011

Saturday, July 9, 2011

From Eurasia Review:

By June 2011, the Arab revolutions had evolved into a series of disconnected but increasingly violent civil wars—particularly in Libya and Syria. The international community has certainly not been spared the effects of these wars. As a long-time patron—if not an ally—of these states, Russia views these trends with mounting anxiety. These revolutions and civil wars pose three serious challenges or even threats to Russia.

Fear Of Domestic Unrest

Domestically, the revolutions could inspire citizens to take autonomous political action against the regime. Alternatively, they could further inflame the insurgency in the North Caucasus among a largely Muslim population to which Russia is already dedicating approximately 250,000 regular army and Ministry of Interior forces. Meanwhile, Moscow clearly has no effective strategy for quelling this violence or for resolving this insurgency by political means.

RussiaRussian domestic and external braggadocio is intended in part to hide the regime’s fears of domestic unrest. Russian officials believe and publicly profess that since 2003 the United States has been trying to foment democracy campaigns in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to undermine existing regimes there. Accordingly, they continue to promote the image of Russia as a besieged fortress surrounded by linked enemies, foreign governments and democratic reformers. Thus, President Dmitry Medvedev said, in March 2011:

"Look at the current situation in the Middle East and the Arab world. It is extremely difficult and great problems still lie ahead. In some cases it may even come to the disintegration of large, heavily populated states, their break-up into smaller fragments. The character of these states is far from straightforward. It may come to very complex events, including the arrival of fanatics into power. This will mean decades of fires and further spread of extremism. We must face the truth. In the past such a scenario was harbored for us, and now attempts to implement it are even more likely. In any case, this plot will not work. But everything that happens there will have a direct impact on our domestic situation in the long term, as long as decades."

While Moscow does not attribute the Arab revolutions to outside forces, it believes that those forces could exploit their example to incite an increasingly dissatisfied populace. In response to the color revolutions of 2003-2005, Moscow has terminated elections of governors, passed increasingly draconian laws suppressing freedom of the press, assembly, speech, and the dissemination of information, and has created thousands of Paramilitary units whose primary mission is to suppress any manifestation of public unrest and autonomous political action. Dissidents and journalists have been jailed, beaten, and sometimes killed. Vladimir Putin has even revived Leonid Brezhnev’s notorious practice of putting dissidents into psychiatric institutions. According to journalist Andrei Soldatov, Russia is also working to prevent a “Facebook Revolution” by proposing that the owners of online social media be responsible for all content posted on their websites. Despite the regime’s habitual public swagger, these policies betray a government deeply afraid of its own people. An April 2009 report outlined the threat perceived by the authorities quite clearly. Specifically it stated:

"The Russian intelligence community is seriously worried about latent social processes capable of leading to the beginning of civil wars and conflicts on RF [Russian Federation] territory that can end up in a disruption of territorial integrity and the appearance of a large number of new sovereign powers. Data of an information “leak,” the statistics and massive number of antigovernment actions, and official statements and appeals of the opposition attest to this."

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On God And Government In The Middle East

From Spero News:

In societies where the attachment to Islamic beliefs is deep and organic, these Western policies all too often fall into the trap of treating "democracy" and "Islam" as mutually hostile value systems. This is simplistic and destructive. In fact, most Muslims want both democracy and Islam -- as the extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment that culminated in Iran's so-called Green Revolution so vividly demonstrates. "Sooner or later, we need to understand how deeply democratic ideas have penetrated the Middle East," Gerecht writes. "Intellectually the world has turned upside down." And he can cite sources from across the region that back up the point.

In this reading, the true standard-bearers of democracy in the Islamic world are none other than those "Arab fundamentalists who believe they can save their societies through God and democracy," and the best solution to the pathologies that still plague their world is to let their followers go to the polls.

He concedes that the results will not always be pretty. What we should keep in mind, however, is the moderating dynamic of popular participation. The author urges us to see elections as the start of a democratizing process rather than as its end. Citing the French Islam scholar Olivier Roy, he points out that the big Islamist movements are at their most moderate in those countries where they've been allowed a voice in the political process. (Roy's list comprises Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait.) And the Green Revolution, the product of three decades of Iranians voting (however imperfectly) for their leaders, dramatizes the extent to which the draw of the ballot box can undermine the radical fundamentalists.

So the new regimes may not give full rights to women? Perhaps. Yet Saddam Hussein's secular Iraq, for all of its anti-sexist rhetoric, was also a country that used rape as a technique of repression. Secular autocracies can scarcely be regarded as guardians of female sovereignty when it is the secret police who reign supreme. Surely the best antidote for male arrogance is allowing women to go to the polls -- a right that most of the mass Islamist parties actually embrace. True institutional change will come, says Gerecht, as women put their votes to use. (Cultural change, he suggests, is already under way, as more and more women in the region move into the workplace and traditional roles quietly shift apace.)

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The Great Proselytizer of Orgasm

Peter D. Kramer writes for Slate:

Today when sex combines with politics, the likely result is humiliation. We think of the crotch shot, the Sofitel suite, the airport restroom stall, the stained blue dress. The sex, which we see as sleazy and compulsive, is a sign of a defective self: risk-prone, greedy, compartmentalized, deluded, and hypocritical.

It's hard, perhaps, to recall that once sex was—in the ideal—radical politics conducted by other means. When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase "the sexual revolution," he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated from the alienating culture and the authoritarian state. Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron is in part a report from that past, when sex held the promise of social reform. His book bears the subtitle, How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, but mostly what Turner offers is a sex-centered biography of Reich, the great proselytizer of orgasm.

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Philip K. Dick: disclosed the real Matrix (1977)

Reading from Philip K Dick's Exegesis set to Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. Music from David Cronenberg's Crash.

Robert Anton Wilson - Who Is The Master?

WHO IS THE MASTER WHO MAKES THE GRASS GREEN?
film/interview by Edgar Pêra Lisboa 1994
Reality-Tunnels according to Master Bob a.ka. Robert Anton Wilson, from the Sub-Geniuz Zchool of Thought. Re-interpretation by Master Joçao Queiroz
7 min. 1996. Prize Tampere Festival

Confessions of A Veteran of The Iraq War: The Real Terrorism Is The American Occupation

Fastest growing economy in the world

As Europe faces its biggest crisis since World War II with some predicting economic catastrophe, this edition of Double Standards takes a look at the responsibilities of the International Monetary Fund. Eritrea in the horn of Africa celebrates its 20th independence anniversary. Eritrea's ambassador to Britain and Ireland talks about the campaign against US sanctions that hasn't stopped some from predicting that this year it is going to have the fastest-growing economy in the world.