Ya Basta

Twenty years.

Twenty years of working harder and harder for less and less.

Twenty years of going into debt for jobs which don't exist.

Twenty years of seeing my society become nastier, crueler, more polarized.

Twenty years of watching the Empire wage monstrous neocolonial wars.

Twenty years of watching the richest 1% steal our jobs, our money, our future.

Twenty years of living in less than 10K a year.


Twenty years of living on one meal a day.

Twenty years of brokenness.

Twenty years of neoliberal hell.


* * * * * *

As a wage-slave, I don't have the funds to be in NY to help the Resistance. But at least I can type these words. And testify to the anger. The terrible, terrible anger which I first experienced in 2003. It would well up suddenly, explosively. It was new to me, something alien to my extremely privileged and reasonably happy childhood (supportive family, good schools, good books, good neighborhoods). I was always polite, shy, geeky. But this anger was like nothing I'd ever felt before. This wasn't geek frustration at a technology not working properly. It was an absolute, terrifying, all-devouring rage.

Heiner Müller wrote about that rage, in words I translated long ago, without fully comprehending them.

Rage at the lies. Rage at the deceit. Rage at the stupidity of a society being driven off the rails by plutocratic thieves who produce nothing but lies, invest in nothing but theft, do nothing but steal.

The words
form the shape
of a fist:
ya basta
NO MORE

The battle begins.

Berlin Curbstomps Neoliberalism

Berlin, home of travel-prone nanobears and sky-pirates.

As some famous person said, somewhere, yarrrrrrr!

Final Watch

Anton Gorodetsky welcomes back Gesar to the Moscow Night Watch (video clip here).

(Mystified? Read Sergei Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" novels -- everything you need to know about where Bearzilla came from, and where it's headed).

In other news, the BRICS are cooking up a little surprise for neoliberalism. You have been warned!

You Are the Resistance

The uprising against Chimerica (a.k.a. Wall Street neoliberalism) begins.

The US: Last Prisonhouse of Orientalism

One of the most striking effects of the Arab Spring has been the media-intensive demolition of the three most prevalent tropes of First World Orientalism. The first is the trope of the docile comprador elite, incarnated by Tunisia's Ben Ali. The second is the trope of the US-bankrolled military leader, epitomized by Egypt's Mubarak. And the third is the occasionally spiteful (but ultimately acquiescent to neoliberal capital) dictator-plutocrat, immemorialized by Libya's Qaddafi.

All three went down in flaming wreckage. The first barely escaped an arrest order by hopping on a plane, the second is in jail, and the third is being hunted down like the low-rent gangster he always was. While the fall of the tyrants has been predictably electrifying on the Middle Eastern region -- several other countries are now in revolutionary ferment -- one of the most intriguing and paradoxical effects of the Arab Spring has been its transformation of the American political unconscious.

This political unconscious did not watch the Arab Spring with joy. Strange as it may sound, it watched with a trepidation tinged with sorrow. Not sorrow for the fallen dictators, but for the fall of the US Empire.

There are good reasons for this. For one thing, the US has been a society in crisis since the 1980s. Faced with the structural decline of its military-industrial empire in the face of overseas competitors, US elites chose a strategy of aggressive speculation and imperial revanchism called neoliberalism. As the decades passed, the scope of neoliberalism's speculation and revanchism kept increasing, and became flagrantly self-destructive.

Neoliberalism was afflicted with a reverse Midas touch: everything it touched eventually blew up in its own face, only with compound interest. 1980s union-busting turned into 1990s deindustrialization and eventually 2000s economic suicide. Likewise, the $400 billion S&L debacle was followed by the $1 trillion dotcom bubble and bust, and finally the $14 trillion (yes, it really was this big, see Nomi Prins for the gory details) securitization and housing bubble, whose implosion nearly melted the world economy. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua turned into regional wars and IMF structural adjustment campaigns in the 1990s, and finally full-scale invasions of Central Asia in the early 2000s.

Adding to the crisis, the US Empire lost its most useful counterplayer, the USSR, in 1991. Ever since then, US elites have been casting about for a substitute for the fiction of the Soviet colossus in order to legitimate their rule. Muslim-bashing and the Terror War were final, desperate attempts to resuscitating the moldering corpses of the Communist boogeyman and the Cold War, and now the Arab Spring has obliterated even these pathetic excuses.

What the Arab Spring symbolizes, above all, is the popular rebellion against neoliberal plutocracy. The message to American citizens is clear: if you don't want plutocrats to despoil your country, you'll have to protest like a Tunisian, walk like an Egyptian, and fight like a Libyan.

The Arab Spring: Building Developmental States

Libya has officially begun the transition to the post-revolutionary era, something nicely underlined by the Transnational National Council's relocation to the newly-freed capital city of Tripoli, where they held their first press conference today.

Despite its small demographic size -- Libya has a population of 7 million, smaller than Tunisia's 10 million and much smaller than Egypt's 84 million -- the success of Libya's revolution will have far-reaching consequences for the entire region. The reason is that both Tunisia and Egypt
have economies deeply damaged by Euro-American neoliberalism and indigenous comprador elites. However, Libya has $150 billion in foreign exchange reserves, plus one-quarter of Africa's energy reserves. A free, democratic Libya is precisely the financial motor the North African region urgently needs.

All the initial signs are promising. The freedom fighters have done a remarkable job in avoiding unnecessary bloodshed and revenge attacks, and have moved quickly to re-establish civic security and stability. Most neighborhoods in Tripoli now have checkpoints, excess weapons are being collected, and electricity, internet and cellphone access have been almost fully restored. There are still isolated firefights with the remnants of Qaddafi's militias, but the vast majority of the city is secure.

Tripoli's extensive cadre of civil servants, engineers and professionals can now begin to reconstruct the country. Libya's financial and energy resources, its newfound sense of national unity and purpose, and competent political leadership could spark an unprecedented economic boom. Libya, Tunisia and Egypt could conceivably form a "growth triangle" which will be one of the two key economic motors of the Middle East (the other is AKP-led Turkey, one of Eurasia's fastest-growing developmental states).
 This isn't to say there won't be missteps along the way. Author Hisham Matar has this timely essay on the challenges of building a post-Qaddafi Libya.

Also, check out this portal of Arabic-language rap music, which will hopefully expand in the near future.

UPDATE: Twitter posts say Mohammed Bin Lamin, the brilliant Misurata artist whose work was mentioned in a previous post, has been freed (along with thousands of others) from the notorious Abu Salim prison.

The Libya You Don't Know

The Arab Spring is on the march, and no dictators, one-party states, or crumbling Empires can stop it. Still, one of the hurdles facing the Arab Spring is the persistence of neo-Orientalist stereotypes about the Arab world in the mainstream English-speaking media. All too often, the region is depicted as a landscape of oil, deserts, and political tyranny. To counter these stereotypes, here's a small sampling of the amazing cultural richness of just one Arab country, the country of Libya.

Sight. Here's a piece called "Tree of Women" by Misurata-based Libyan artist Mohammad Bin Lamin:

Bin Lamin's works are riveting, haunted by postcolonial ghosts and yet scintillating with energy. More of his work can be seen here and here (his homepage is here). Early in the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi thugs ravaged Misurata, killing and abducting thousands of people. The revolutionaries defeated them and drove them out of the city, but Bin Lamin was one of those abducted. His current whereabouts are unknown. 

Sound. In 2010 and 2011, exiled Libyan musician Ibn Thabit created some of the finest rap music of the Arabic region, including this track, which may go down in history as the unofficial anthem of the revolution (his homepage is here, and his Youtube videos are here). Recently, Ibn Thabit made the courageous decision to join the frontlines of the revolution -- read his latest account of the revolution in the Nafusa mountains.

Diversity.The Libyan revolution is not just about formal political liberation, it's also about the liberation of the long-suppressed cultural diversity of Libyan society. Some of the staunchest defenders of the revolution are the Amazigh (also known in English as Berber) inhabitants of the Nafusa mountains, whose language and culture were ruthlessly suppressed by the dictatorship. A Libyan resident of the mountains created this video, counterpointing the soaring music and words of Algerian artist Idir (a member of the Algerian branch of the Amazigh) to images of the mountains and its revolution. Note that the language is not Arabic but Amazigh, and English subtitles are included in the video. 

Food. Last but surely not least, Libya has its own world-class culinary traditions. You can check out some of them at the Libyan Food Blog, with authentic Libyan and regional recipes. We've tried some of them, and can certify they're delicious.