From despair to where? We the People

But it is also now a reminder of promised hope ultimately unfulfilled, and many artists might have concluded they would stay away from politics in future as a result. Instead, Fairey has been at the centre of a Kickstarter initiative to finance a protest poster campaign against Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration called “We the people: public art for the inauguration and beyond”. It has been a great success, raising US$1.4m (£1.1m) in a week. This will see the posters printed as full page adverts in the Washington Post; as placards to be distributed for the inauguration; and as postcards to send to the new president.
 

The new images do not feature Trump or even refer to him directly, concentrating instead on the ethnic groups that face being excluded from this new president’s America. It’s a radical shift in focus that nevertheless retains the colours from the Obama image and Fairey’s signature stencil style. What does this tell us about his journey as a commentator – and about political art in 2017?
 

Lost illusions

Fairey’s Obama poster was not about a man but rather a heroic, idealised, abstracted icon. It showed Obama thoughtfully looking upwards and to the right, into the distance towards the future hopes of the nation. It symbolised the promise of things yet to come, yet to be imagined – in keeping with other leaders elected on aspirations for change, such as Tony Blair or John F Kennedy. In Fairey’s image, hope is promised but nothing is specific. It invites the viewer to project their own desires into the icon’s imagination.
 

For all its inspirational power, the poster set itself up to fail by making a personal promise it could not keep. How could one man fulfil the individual hopes of millions of citizens? Once held up as an example of how a political poster could help bring about positive change in the world, now it perhaps serves as a warning that it’s all just propaganda in the end.

Fairey certainly counts himself among those disappointed by Obama’s eight years in office. When asked in an interview in 2015 whether he thought Obama had lived up to the promise of his poster, Fairey answered bluntly:
 

Not even close … Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected.

We the people

Fairey’s three posters in the new campaign are only superficially similar to the Obama image. Choosing not to feature the incoming president as either hero or villain, they show members of the public that represent marginalised groups within society. According to the Kickstarter pitch, it is about creating “a series of images that capture the shared humanity of our diverse America”. Two other images have been contributed by fellow artists Ernesto Yerena and Jessica Sabogal.
 

While the central themes of Fairey’s art have always been propaganda and power, the “Hope” poster was very much about a conventional traditional propaganda approach that operated in the future tense. There is no unspecified hope in his new images; the figures do not make promises about the future. They know what they want now.

Over the text “We the People are greater than fear” a Muslim woman wearing a US flag hijab piercingly locks eyes with the viewer. By staring directly in this way, the poster becomes a personal confrontation. It is a direct challenge to consider what it means to be a member of the “We the People” of the American constitution and to uphold common values such as freedom from fear within this society.

Fairey’s image of the dreadlocked African-American boy inverts Obama’s distant upwards dreaming pose by looking downwards to the left. He is not looking for a hero to save him. His eyes are not fixed on a vague dream of hope, but resolutely on the realities of living as a black American citizen today.
 

This work demonstrates that Fairey has learned and matured as a political communicator since 2008. By shifting the tense from future-imaginary to present-reality, and the power from the heroic politician to the individual citizen, his 2017 posters become more than propaganda. They have the potential to become, as they said on Kickstarter, “symbols of hope”, offering a positive strategy to “disrupt the rising tide of hate and fear in America”.

As Fairey said recently, “We have Trump, so what’s the antidote? The antidote is not attacking Trump more.” These are protest posters which attack hate by refusing to attack. In doing so, they offer new hope for the role and relevance of political art in Trump’s America.

Author is Lecturer, Graphic Design, Edinburgh Napier University

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Image: India Today

In early November, without warning, the Indian government declared  the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington's role has been disguised only very superficially.

US-President Barack Obama has declared the strategic partnership with India a priority of his foreign policy. China needs to be reined in. In the context of this partnership, the US government’s development agency USAID has negotiated cooperation agreements with the Indian ministry of finance. One of these has the declared goal to push back the use of cash in favor of digital payments in India and globally.

On November 8, Indian prime minster Narendra Modi announced that the two largest denominations of banknotes could not be used for payments any more with almost immediate effect. Owners could only recoup their value by putting them into a bank account before the short grace period expired at year end, which many people and businesses did not manage to do , due to long lines in front of banks. The amount of cash that banks were allowed to pay out to individual customers was severely restricted. Almost half of Indians have no bank account and many do not even have a bank nearby. The economy is largely cash based. Thus, a severe shortage of cash ensued. Those who suffered the most were the poorest  and most vulnerable. They had additional difficulty earning their meager living in the informal sector or paying for essential goods and services like food, medicine or hospitals. Chaos and fraud reigned  well into December.
 

Four weeks earlier

Not even four weeks before this assault on Indians, USAID had announced the establishment of „Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership“, with the goal of effecting a quantum leap in cashless payment in India. The press statement  of October 14 says that Catalyst “marks the next phase of partnership between USAID and Ministry of Finance to facilitate universal financial inclusion”. The statement does not show up in the list of press statements  on the website of USAID (anymore?). Not even filtering statements with the word “India” would bring it up. To find it, you seem to have to know it exists, or stumble upon it in a web search. Indeed, this and other statements, which seemed rather boring before, have become a lot more interesting and revealing after November 8.

Reading the statements with hindsight it becomes obvious, that Catalyst and the partnership of USAID and the Indian Ministry of Finance, from which Catalyst originated, are little more than fronts which were used to be able to prepare the assault on all Indians using cash without arousing undue suspicion. Even the name Catalyst sounds a lot more ominous, once you know what happened on November 9.

Catalyst’s Director of Project Incubation is Alok Gupta, who used to be Chief Operating Officer of the World Resources Institute in Washington, which has USAID as one of its main sponsors. He was also an original member of the team that developed Aadhaar, the Big-Brother-like biometric identification system.

According to a report  of the Indian Economic Times, USAID has committed to finance Catalyst for three years. Amounts are kept secret.

Badal Malick was Vice President of India's most important online marketplace Snapdeal, before he was appointed as CEO of Catalyst. He commented:
 „Catalyst’s mission is to solve multiple coordination problems that have blocked the penetration of digital payments among merchants and low-income consumers. We look forward to creating a sustainable and replicable model. (…) While there has been (…) a concerted push for digital payments by the government, there is still a last mile gap when it comes to merchant acceptance and coordination issues. We want to bring a holistic ecosystem approach to these problems.“
 

Ten months earlier

The multiple coordination problem and the cash-ecosystem-issue that Malick mentions had been analysed in a report that USAID commissioned in 2015 and presented in January 2016, in the context of the anti-cash partnership with the Indian Ministry of Finance. The press release  on this presentation is also not in USAID's list of press statements (anymore?). The title of the study was “Beyond Cash ”.

„Merchants, like consumers, are trapped in cash ecosystems, which inhibits their interest” in digital payment it said in the report. Since few traders accept digital payments, few consumers have an interest in it, and since few consumers use digital payments, few traders have an interest in it. Given that banks and payment providers charge fees for equipment to use or even just try out digital payment, a strong external impulse is needed to achieve a level of card penetration that would create mutual interest of both sides in digital payment options.

It turned out in November that the declared “holistic ecosystem approach” to create this impulse consisted in destroying the cash-ecosystem for a limited time and to slowly dry it up later, by limiting the availability of cash from banks for individual customers. Since the assault had to be a surprise to achieve its full catalyst-results, the published Beyond-Cash-Study and the protagonists of Catalyst could not openly describe their plans. They used a clever trick to disguise them and still be able to openly do the necessary preparations, even including expert hearings. They consistently talked of a regional field experiment that they were ostensibly planning.

"The goal is to take one city and increase the digital payments 10x in six to 12 months," said Malick  less than four weeks before most cash was abolished in the whole of India. To not be limited in their preparation on one city alone, the Beyond-Cash-report and Catalyst kept talking about a range of regions they were examining, ostensibly in order to later decide which was the best city or region for the field experiment. Only in November did it became clear that the whole of India should be the guinea-pig-region for a global drive to end the reliance on cash. Reading a statement of Ambassador Jonathan Addleton, USAID Mission Director to India, with hindsight, it becomes clear that he stealthily announced that, when he said four weeks earlier:

“India is at the forefront of global efforts to digitize economies and create new economic opportunities that extend to hard-to-reach populations. Catalyst will support these efforts by focusing on the challenge of making everyday purchases cashless."
Veterans of the war on cash in action

Who are the institutions behind this decisive attack on cash? Upon the presentation of the Beyond-Cash-report, USAID declared: “Over 35 key Indian, American and international organizations have partnered with the Ministry of Finance and USAID on this initiative.” On the website catalyst.org one can see that they are mostly IT- and payment service providers who want to make money from digital payments or from the associated data generation on users. Many are veterans of,what a high-ranking official of Deutsche Bundesbank called the “war of interested financial institutions on cash” (in German ). They include the Better Than Cash Alliance, the Gates Foundation (Microsoft), Omidyar Network (eBay), the Dell Foundation Mastercard, Visa, Metlife Foundation.

The Better Than Cash Alliance

The Better Than Cash Alliance , which includes USAID as a member, is mentioned first for a reason. It was founded in 2012 to push back cash on a global scale. The secretariat is housed at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDP) in New York, which might have its reason in the fact that this rather poor small UN-organization was glad to have the Gates-Foundation in one of the two preceding years and the Master-Card-Foundation in the other as its most generous donors.

The members of the Alliance are large US-Institutions which would benefit most from pushing back cash, i.e. credit card companies Mastercard and Visa, and also some US-institutions whose names come up a lot in books on the history of the United States intelligence services, namely Ford Foundation and USAID. A prominent member is also the Gates-Foundation. Omidyar Network of eBay-founder Pierre Omidyar and Citi are important contributors. Almost all of these are individually also partners in the current USAID-India-Initiative to end the reliance on cash in India and beyond. The initiative and the Catalyst-program seem little more than an extended Better Than Cash Alliance, augmented by Indian and Asian organizations with a strong business interest in a much decreased use of cash.

Reserve Bank of India’s IMF-Chicago Boy

The partnership to prepare the temporary banning of most cash in India coincides roughly with the tenure of Raghuram Rajan at the helm of Reserve Bank of India from September 2013 to September 2016. Rajan (53) had been, and is now again, economics professor at the University of Chicago. From 2003 to 2006 he had been Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington. (This is a cv-item he shares with another important warrior against cash, Ken Rogoff.) He is a member of the Group of Thirty , a rather shady organization , where high ranking representatives of the world major commercial financial institutions share their thoughts and plans with the presidents of the most important central banks, behind closed doors and with no minutes taken. It becomes increasingly clear that the Group of Thirty is one of the major coordination centers of the worldwide war on cash. Its membership includes other key warriers like Rogoff, Larry Summers and others.

Raghuram Rajan has ample reason to expect to climb further to the highest rungs in international finance and thus had good reason to play Washington’s game well. He already was  a President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoney and by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top jobs in international finance.

As a Central Bank Governor, Rajan was liked and well respected by the financial sector, but very much disliked by company people from the real (producing) sector, despite his penchant for deregulation and economic reform. The main reason was the restrictive monetary policy he introduced and staunchly defended. After he was viciously criticized  from the ranks of the governing party, he declared in June that he would not seek a second term in September. Later he told the New York Times that he had wanted to stay on, but not for a whole term, and that premier Modi would not have that. A former commerce and law Minister, Mr. Swamy, said  on the occasion of Rajan’s  departure that it would make Indian industrialists happy:

“I certainly wanted him out, and I made it clear to the prime minister, as clear as possible. (…) His audience was essentially Western, and his audience in India was transplanted westernized society. People used to come in delegations to my house to urge me to do something about it.”
 

A disaster that had to happen

If Rajan was involved in the preparation of this assault to declare most of Indians’ banknotes illegal – and there should be little doubt about that, given his personal and institutional links and the importance of Reserve Bank of India in the provision of cash – he had ample reason to stay in the background. After all, it cannot have surprised anyone closely involved in the matter, that this would result in chaos and extreme hardship, especially for the majority of poor and rural Indians, who were flagged as the supposed beneficiaries of the badly misnamed "financial-inclusion”-drive. USAID and partners had analysed the situation extensively and found in the Beyond-Cash-report that 97% of transactions were done in cash and that only 55% of Indians had a bank account. They also found that even of these bank accounts, "only 29% have been used in the last three months“.

All this was well known and made it a certainty that suddenly abolishing most cash would cause severe and even existential problems to many small traders and producers and to many people in remote regions without banks. When it did, it became obvious, how false the promise of financial inclusion by digitalization of payments and pushing back cash has always been. There simply is no other means of payment that can compete with cash in allowing everybody with such low hurdles to participate in the market economy.

However, for Visa, Mastercard and the other payment service providers, who were not affected by these existential problems of the huddled masses, the assault on cash will most likely turn out a big success, “scaling up” digital payments in the “trial region”. After this chaos and with all the losses that they had to suffer, all business people who can afford it, are likely to make sure they can accept digital payments in the future. And consumers, who are restricted in the amount of cash they can get from banks now, will use opportunities to pay with cards, much to the benefit of Visa, Mastercard and the other members of the extended Better Than Cash Alliance.
 

Why Washington is waging a global war on cash

The business interests of the US-companies that dominate the gobal IT business and payment systems are an important reason for the zeal of the US-government in its push to reduce cash use worldwide, but it is not the only one and might not be the most important one. Another motive is surveillance power that goes with increased use of digital payment. US-intelligence organizations and IT-companies together can survey all international payments done through banks and can monitor most of the general stream of digital data. Financial data tends to be the most important and valuable.

Even more importantly, the status of the dollar as the worlds currency of reference and the dominance of US companies in international finance provide the US government with tremendous power over all participants in the formal non-cash financial system. It can make everybody conform to American law rather than to their local or international rules. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has recently run a chilling story describing how that works (German ). Employees of a Geran factoring firm doing completely legal business with Iran were put on a US terror list, which meant that they were shut off most of the financial system and even some logistics companies would not transport their furniture any more. A major German bank was forced to fire several employees upon US request, who had not done anything improper or unlawful.

There are many more such examples. Every internationally active bank can be blackmailed by the US government into following their orders, since revoking their license to do business in the US or in dollar basically amounts to shutting them down. Just think about Deutsche Bank, which had to negotiate with the US treasury for months whether they would have to pay a fne of 14 billion dollars and most likely go broke, or get away with seven billion  and survive. If you have the power to bankrupt the largest banks even of large countries, you have power over their governments, too. This power through dominance over the financial system and the associated data is already there. The less cash there is in use, the more extensive and secure it is, as the use of cash is a major avenue for evading this power.

Courtesy: NewsClick.in

The post Is Washington Behind India’s Brutal Experiment of Abolishing Cash? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A political failure outstripped by history

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday (May 2). And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American president turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body’s secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron thought it “a massive step forward”. India described it as a “victorious milestone”. “A resounding triumph,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find bin Laden, pray let us have no more “resounding triumphs”. Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come, by the little groupuscules in the West, who have no direct contact with al-Qaeda. Be sure, someone is already dreaming up a “Brigade of the Martyr Osama bin Laden”. Maybe in Afghanistan, among the Taliban.

But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qaeda was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic caliphate. But these past few months millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

In his own eyes, his achievement was the creation of al-Qaeda, the institution which had no card-carrying membership. You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qaeda – and you were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There was no computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While the Arab dictators ruled uncontested with our support, they largely avoided condemning American policy; only bin Laden said these things. Arabs never wanted to fly planes into tall buildings but they did admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But now, increasingly, they can say these things. They don’t need bin Laden. He had become a nonentity.

But talking of caves, bin Laden’s demise does bring Pakistan into grim focus. For months President Ali Zardari has been telling us that bin Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan. Now it turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan. Betrayed? Of course he was. By the Pakistan military or the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew where he was.

Not only was Abbottabad the home of the country’s military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott of the British army in 1853 – but it is the headquarters of Pakistan’s Northern Army Corps’ Second Division. Scarcely a year ago I sought an interview with another “most wanted man” – the leader of the group believed to be responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by uniformed Pakistani policemen holding machine guns.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched the mass revolutions unfold in the Middle East this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

Of course, there is one more obvious question unanswered: couldn’t they have captured bin Laden? Didn’t the CIA or the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? “Justice,” Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, “justice” meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the sons of Saddam, bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be taken alive – and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he died.

But a court would have worried more people than bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia’s former head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980.

Oddly, he was not the “most wanted man” for the international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001. He gained his Wild West status by al-Qaeda’s earlier attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in Dhahran. He was always waiting for cruise missiles – so was I when I met him. He had waited for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his bodyguards refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk over the mountains to Pakistan. Some of his time he would spend in Karachi – he was obsessed with Karachi; he even, weirdly, gave me photographs of pro-bin Laden graffiti on the walls of the former Pakistani capital and praised the city’s imams.

His relations with other Muslims were mysterious; when I met him in Afghanistan, he initially feared the Taliban, refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training camp – he handed me over to his al-Qaeda lieutenants to protect me on the journey the next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics and all dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate with Iraq’s ex-Baathists against the country’s American occupiers, and said so in an audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never praised Hamas and was scarcely worthy of their “holy warrior” definition on May 2 which played – as usual – straight into Israel’s hands.

In the years after 2001, I maintained a faint indirect communication with bin Laden, once meeting one of his trusted al-Qaeda associates at a secret location in Pakistan. I wrote out a list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one weekend, waiting to give a lecture in St Louis in the US, I was told that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from bin Laden. And one by one – without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes, he wanted the Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could destroy them.

When Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading with bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl and his wife had looked after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in 2001; he even gave me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told that bin Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been murdered. Or so he said.

Yet bin Laden’s own obsessions blighted even his family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been killed in Sunday’s American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him if he was happy. He said “yes” in English. But in 2009 he published a book called Growing Up bin Laden and – recalling how his father killed his beloved dogs in a chemical warfare experiment – described him as an “evil man”. In his book, he too remembered our meeting; and concluded that he should have told me that no, he was not a happy child.

By midday on May 2, I had three phone calls from Arabs, all certain that it was bin Laden’s double who was killed by the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that Saddam’s sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In due course, al-Qaeda will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and it was a double, we’re going to be treated to yet another videotape from the real bin Laden – and President Barack Obama will lose the next election.

This article was published in The Independent on May 3, 2011; www.independent.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden
 

The post The death of Osama Bin Laden appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 

Osama bin Laden’s assassination should provide us with a good deal to think about.

It is increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition – except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects”. In April 2002 the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know eight months earlier when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence – which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said in his White House statement that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda”.

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the US invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervour is already very high in Pakistan and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and scepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There is more to say about (Cuban airline bomber Orlando) Bosch who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It is like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It is as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”.

There is much more to say but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

This article was posted on the blog of the online magazine Guernica on May 6, 2011; www.guernicamag.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden
 

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Osama bin Laden’s American legacy

Back in the 1960s Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam war: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it is a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its 10th year.

As everybody not blind, deaf and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated. Literally. By Navy Seals. Or, as one of a crowd of revellers who appeared in front of the White House on May 1 put it, on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: ‘Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead’.

And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were VJ day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.

Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it is an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it is we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labelled the Global War on Terror.

Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely non-violent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time magazine has written, “little more than a historical footnote” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.

Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood.

The Tao of Terrorism

If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the US, the hulking proportions of a supervillain if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al-Qaeda, his organisation, was at best a ragtag crew that even in its heyday, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacular and spectacularly murderous actions but only one of them every year or two.

Bin Laden was never “Hitler”, nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions, though sometimes they were billed as such. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its “camps” were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about, not on a superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $4,00,000 to $5,00,000 which, in superpower terms, was pure chump change. 

Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the US. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost 10 years wouldn’t have passed before he died or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?

The world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood

It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet into a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if you’re writing bin Laden’s obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meagre powers many times over.

After all, while he only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington – with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons and troops at its command – was capable of launching operations every day. In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and turning them to his own ends.

It was he, thanks to 9/11, who insured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who also insured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who brought America’s Afghan war to Pakistan and American aircraft, bombs and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organisation like his could thrive.

Don’t be surprised then that in these last months or even years bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism. In fact, the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven”.

Dead and alive

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) – from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world where we were to cower in terror while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on US military operations we still have almost 1,00,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organisation which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

Now he is officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us. 

When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we will once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.

For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.

Those chants of “USA! USA!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001 when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury and a people on the edge.

Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those non-violent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af-Pak theatre of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.

On September 17, 2001 President Bush was asked whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive’.” Dead or alive. Now it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.

The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s American legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is theoretically gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win? n

This article was posted on TomDispatch.com on May 5, 2011; www.tomdispatch.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

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Pakistan: A state of perpetual self-denial

How gullible do the Americans think we are? Do they actually think that we Pakistanis would believe the lies they are spreading about Osama bin Laden’s tragic murder and his demeaning burial at sea?

We are just too smart to be made fools of like this. There was no Osama in that compound in Abbottabad. The Americans killed a lookalike. The real Osama died of gall bladder failure in a bush in Sudan in 2002. What’s more, his supposed wives that were captured from the Abbottabad compound were look-alikes too and so were the children.

But it doesn’t stop here. We Pakistanis know that the news about Osama’s death from a gall bladder ailment in Sudan in 2002 is also suspect. That guy too was a lookalike. So yes, it can safely be said that the guy they killed in Abbottabad in 2011 was actually a lookalike of the lookalike.

So when did Osama die if not in 2002 or 2011? According to a super-famous journalist and TV anchor, Tipu Sultan, who interviewed Osama in an impoverished disco in Kandahar in 1998, Osama was actually dead at the time of the interview. He said that the guy he talked to was actually a man called Abdul Al-Bakir Al-Shaikh Al-Qaedawallah, an expert Osama lookalike who told him (off the record) that Osama actually died (of malaria) in the jungles of the Congo in 1991.

Nevertheless, there is every likelihood that the Congo guy was a lookalike as well. So, in other words, the guy who the Americans claimed to have killed in Abbottabad was really a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike. But if we really come to the truth and reality, things do not seem so complicated. So what is this truth and reality? Simple. There never was an Osama. He was never born. It was all an American concoction.

The character of Osama bin Laden was first conceived by America’s 15th president, James Buchanan, in 1859 when, along with the queen of England, he decided to begin a new crusade against Muslims. According to the well-known Muslim historian, Naseem Hijazi, the British monarchy had accused a man called Osama bin Laden of financing and instigating the 1857 Indian army mutiny against the British imperialists.

The Americans and the British then claimed they had suppressed the mutiny by killing Osama in a daring raid. He was claimed to have been hiding in the hookah lounge of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar denied the accusations, saying no such man was seen on his radar.

The British exiled Zafar to Burma and destroyed the radar, saying there was no such thing as a radar. By the way, the guy the British claimed was Zafar was not exiled to Burma. He was only a lookalike. The real Zafar died of dengue fever in Guatemala where he had gone to raise an army against the British and to study tropical plants. Famous thinker and horticulturalist, Noam Chomsky, confirms this.

This concocted episode was rightly expunged from history books by Muslim historians until America brought the invisible Osama character back to life in the 1990s. They had originally planned to use him as a bogey to invade Canada but changed their plans when they got jealous of all the amazing and unprecedented economic, cultural and military progress taking place in Afghanistan under the Taliban and Pakistan under a bunch of handsome military men.

Thus, not surprisingly, the 9/11 episode happened. We all know who was responsible. Not a single Jew died in that attack. Neither did any animists or pagans, nor any Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. The truth is, only Muslims died in that attack. The proof? Simple. Log on to YouTube and check out the brilliant, award-winning documentaries, Loose Nut and The Drivels. Popcorn is on the house.

The guy the western media showed praising the 9/11 attacks on video was not Osama. He was just some Arab skiing enthusiast telling (with gestures) his Afghan friends about his latest skiing trip to the Alps. There never was an Osama. Just like there is no Mullah Omar, no Taliban, no al-Qaeda. They are all American concoctions.

Furthermore, America never won the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s break-up was also a concoction. The Soviet Union is still alive and thriving. We don’t hear about it because the Jewish-controlled media has blocked all news about the Soviet Union. That is because the Afghan and Arab mujahideen who fought against it liberated Afghanistan and conquered the Soviet Union and turned it into a caliphate. That’s why America’s next target will be Vladimir Putin (real name Valeed Amir Butinov). So if one day you hear that Americans have assassinated Putin, don’t believe it. The real Putin died of a kidney ailment in 1045 AD.

The president and prime minister of Pakistan should resign for making America make fools of Pakistanis. The army is not to be blamed. The radar that did not pick up American helicopters on May 2 was not a radar. It was a lookalike of the real thing that the Americans didn’t give us. Only the mighty Imran Khan hinted at this while picking his nose on TV the other day. It was a sign: ‘Dig deep, dear patriots. You have nothing to lose but your heads.’ Well said, Imran (real name Genghis), because, after all, who needs heads when the knees can perform the same function?

 
This article was published on Dawn.com on May 15, 2011.Courtesy: Dawn; www.dawn.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden 

The post The land of make-believe appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 

An unintended gift to the faith

Behind the ugly reality, there is poetic justice. Osama bin Laden was finally bearded in the world’s most ‘happening’ terror den: Pakistan. Osama is no more but who does not know that the cult of violence that he practised and preached in Islam’s name is alive and kicking in Pakistan as nowhere else? This article however is about Osama’s unintended gift to post-9/11 Islam.

Step back just a decade and you’d think that Muslims engaged with the ‘Islam and Modernity’ paradigm were few and far between. The dominant voices in the world of 20th century Islam, especially its latter half, were those of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami on the Indian subcontinent), Sayyid Qutb (leading theologian of the Egypt-born Muslim Brotherhood) and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (who gave birth to Wahhabism, the rigid, intolerant Islam of Saudi Arabia).

Born and bred as a devout Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, it was easy for Osama to embrace the shared belief of Maududi and Qutb that all man-made ideas and systems – pan-Arabism, democracy, socialism, communism – were bankrupt: only Shariah law, ruthlessly enforced by an Islamic state, could restore divine order in the world. Thanks to an intermixture of Wahhabism, Qutbism and Maududism, what would otherwise have been an Afghan national liberation movement against the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s turned into a laboratory of violent, global jihad. Osama was the most lethal product of this cross-fertilisation. And then there was 9/11, al-Qaeda’s own welcome message to the 21st century and the new millennium.

Call it the Hegelian dialectic: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Some Muslims rejoiced over this “humiliation” of the only global superpower (so soon after the mujahids had facilitated the demise of the rival superpower). Others insisted that 9/11 was a mean CIA-Mossad conspiracy to fan Islamophobia. But saner members of the ummah were horrified that such a monstrosity could be committed in the name of a faith that literally means peace. The poison that Osama and al-Qaeda injected into Islam found its antidote within Islam. Thank you, Hegel.

“Islam was hijacked on 9/11”, declared the American convert Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. The UK-based scholar Ziauddin Sardar was as prompt in issuing his ‘fatwa against the fanatics’. With such opening salvos, the last decade has seen an ever growing number of Muslim voices eager not only to reclaim their faith from the extremists but also, in the words of Sardar, to “rebuild Islam brick by brick”.

Though Osama has now been rendered inactive, the terror machine is yet to be dismantled, the theology of violent jihad is yet to be pushed out of the marketplace of ideas. But there are reasons to nurture hope. You can today build a small personal library just with books entitled Seeds of Terror, The Nuclear Jihadist, Terror in the Name of God, Sacred Rage, Talibanisation of Pakistan, Descent into Chaos and so on. But should you feel so inclined, you will need to multiply shelf space several times over to add the books and videos infused with the spirit of a New Age Islam.

A decade ago the theologians of a tolerant, plural, gender-just, rights and freedom-friendly, pro-democracy Islam were few in number. Today not only is their tribe growing rapidly but an ever increasing number of Muslims, both men and women, are reading and interpreting the Koran and the traditions of the prophet in sync with modern sensibilities.

Sadly, we in India aren’t familiar with them yet. But they are important, influential names across much of the world. The US-based Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl, for example, is a strong proponent of human rights, a staunch advocate of gender equality and is among the most critical and powerful voices against puritan and Wahhabi Islam today. Then there is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre includes him in its list of the top 50 most influential Muslims in the world. The magazine Egypt Today described him as a kind of theological rock star, “the Elvis Presley of western Muslims”.

Or take Tariq Ramadan, the UK-based author of Radical Reform. An online poll by the American Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 placed Ramadan at the 49th spot in a list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals. And let’s not forget Amina Wadud, Islamic feminist, imam and author of Inside the Gender Jihad. In March 2005 she stirred up quite a storm in the Muslim world after leading a Friday prayer for over 100 male and female Muslims in New York.

In the first year of the 21st century Osama stretched the dominant Islamic thought of the 20th century to its extreme. A decade later, there is a growing body of books, lectures and the World Wide Web propounding an Islam that is at home with the modern world and vice versa. And in the last few months such intellectuals and scholars have struck common ground with the masses on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain…

Osama must have had many a nightmare during his last days of hiding.

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

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