Reynolds, Nicholas. 2022. Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. Mariner Books: New York and Boston.
Nicholas
Reynolds is a historian. Need to Know traces the rise of what
ultimately has become known as the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps
the most famous intelligence body among the eighteen spy institutions in the
U.S.
Given the
lure and stature the CIA enjoys today, readers may easily think that the
process promulgated in creating the spying structure had been smooth or
problem-free. After all, why the fuzz as the country needed a professional spy
agency like no other and similar to similar agencies in the rest of the world?
But the story about the CIA creation is radically different from this perceived
wisdom for reasons Reynolds specifically outlines in this exceptional 500-plus
pages. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to grasp the hard knocks of the birth
that marked the preliminaries of what is now the solid institution without
which the U.S. cannot be imagined.
For beginners
in intelligence history, Reynolds's story makes sense only when knowing that
before World War II, the U.S. did not have a permanent spy institution for a
century and a half of its existence. Strange as it seems now, since its
inception, the country's founding fathers have opposed the spying principle.
The Puritans' bent on starting the City upon a Hill morphed into distancing
their polity from disgraceful and cheap practices of the old world, a situation
that U.S. elites and insiders of the establishment throughout U.S. history
could not easily untangle until the advent of WWII.
In
contrast, with WWII and the U.S. general mood dramatically changing in favour
of less isolationism and more involvement in world affairs, the U.S. granted
permission to eavesdrop on enemies' communication traffic. All these and more,
Reynolds elaborates, showing politicians' extreme caution and suspicion of this
change in state policy, precisely the bias, against spying as the backbone
underlying state policy for accessing information. In licensing a spying
agency, a free hand could have spurred undesired consequences and turned the
promise of the City upon a Hill into yet another corrupt and degenerate polity
of the old world.
With this
background in mind, we understand the difficulties, the hesitations, and the
half-hearted beginnings of what will become during and particularly after WWII,
the U.S. intelligence taking an industrial scale. We read that even when he
favoured founding a body that could provide answers and offer policymakers an
advantage when negotiating with representatives of foreign governments,
President Roosevelt had always resisted replicating British or European
intelligence structures.
With the
ongoing war in Europe, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940 and
certainly, before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, FDR authorized
Colonel Willian J. Donovan to form what was for him more or less an amateur spy
body, compared to the British MI6 and in parallel to already existing institutions
such as Military Intelligence Division (MID), Office of Naval Intelligence
(ONI) and of course the FBI. A key preoccupation for FDR is the management of
the massive traffic, literally the tons of sensitive information reaching his
office. The administration is ideally carried out through coordination between
the already existing structures. In addition to the coordination task, the
Colonel has in mind an additional task dear to his heart, the planning and
executing undercover operations.
In June
1941, Roosevelts signed the order to create the Coordinator of Information COI
amidst opposition and resistance from the FBI and other intelligence bodies
(those of the Army and the Navy). Like with all novel experiences, the
established bureaucracies did not welcome the newborn arrival for fear it would
dwarf their work as COI was placed directly under the White House. The
intrigues in the hierarchy will oblige Roosevelt to transform the new baby into
OSS (Office of Strategic Service) under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. Put in charge of the budding institution, Donovan had to work twice as
hard as other intelligence organizations to prove to his superiors the
usefulness of the new establishment. One must remember that the new
establishment was functioning amidst competing and the ever-suspicious
Military, Navy, and FBI. Because they could break codes about Japanese
diplomatic and military traffic, the Navy and the Army saw little utility in
Donovan's body. Besides, they wanted to protect their code-breaking
enterprises. This explains how they were mortally obsessed with safekeeping, a
substantial advantage over the enemy, thanks to their code-breaking. Hence why
they resisted full cooperation with Denovan's agency.
Donovan's
tours in Britain gave him the incentive to founding an American equivalent to
the deeply entrenched British intelligence services. Ever eager to actively
participate in the war, Donovan's early mission as head of the COI had been in
China and India after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the far east.
His collaboration with the British helped enlist American and local sabotage
operations behind enemy lines. His real contribution as head of OSS, for which
decision-makers in Washington were thrilled, comes in the context of the
landing in Normandy, the liberation of France, and the arrangement of German
army defection in northern Italy in the early months of 1945.
Still,
with FDR's death in April 1945 and the end of hostilities in the European war
theatre, Donovan and his structure fell out of favour. Again, the fall was not
for lack of pertinent reasons. While the new administration seized on the key
role of intelligence in shortening the length of the war and with
recommendations from the Navy and Army, it still wanted to restructure OSS by
distributing its staff among the Navy, Army, and the State Department.
President Truman found out that a real restructuring has to begin with
relieving Donovan from his duties while awarding him for the achievements that
have given an edge to the Allies' war efforts.
For
precision's sake, Reynolds specifies that Truman bore no ill feelings against
Donovan or OSS. That policy can be explained only by the old American bias
against intelligence which reemerged after the victory in WWII. Truman was
afraid that the exceptional success of intelligence could propagate to make the
U.S., just like other European democracies, drift in peaceful times toward
dictatorship because intelligence could not control its ambitions.
Reynolds'
writing in this book is conversational, and as such, it is engaging. His
chit-chat style delves into what initially looks like secondary bits or
extended biographies, all for exploring pertinent backgrounds. The reading
of Need to Know flies because its author is careful about providing
the right environment. The extensive endnotes and bibliography entries at the
end underline the author's passion, who wanted to translate how a central
intelligence structure has never been systematic or planned from the start.
Quite the contrary, if anything, Reynolds' narrative illustrates that the
process that was promulgated in 1947 to what had become the CIA has been
through trial-and-error, accommodating how policymakers variedly (some slowly;
others quickly) registered American victory not only against the axis forces
but also against America's Allies in 1945. Marshalling the mindset to seize on
that exceptional victory had to end in a central intelligence agency in which
COI and OSS serve as excellent precursors.
Fouad
Mami
Université d’Adrar (Algeria)
Kraidy,
M. Marwan. (2017). The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab
World. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, London. pp. 304.
Do
you want to quell a social revolution? The easiest recipe is to defuse its
incendiary social content by simply publicizing it as a quest for the
sensational and voyeuristic. Short of ideas? You already have a rich arsenal of
Oriental imagery and tropes. Therefore, portray those asking for their rights
as unworthy of such demands since they haven't resolved the simplest of
concerns; they are still mapping the geography of their second half, women.
Diverting attention from demands for "bread, freedom, and social
justice", the initial call of the Egyptian Uprising 2011, often works by
portraying these revolutions as sensationalist and spectacular demands for
gender equality. Worse, the counterrevolutions' best weapons narrate a story
about how restrictive and addictive to restrict women's freedom because, as
unworthy people, Arabs asking for their rights cannot see beyond their women's
vaginas. Hence, they cannot be serious when asking for "bread, freedom and
social justice".
Kraidy
is neither naïve nor wicked to synthesize the Arab uprisings as a quest for
voyeurism. His premise, however, hinges on the idea that the social uprisings
can be approximated as a creative insurgency that is infatuated with, even
fixated on, the body. The body has been the most salient trope that marks the
creative insurgency, otherwise known as the Arab Spring. To illustrate his
point, Kraidy distinguishes between three varieties of artworks, each deploying
the body to serve its message. First, there are those incendiary works such as
Bouazizi's suicidal self-inflammation, an act that had a domino effect as it
deposed several dictators. Second, there are those sarcastic works with
scornful references to dictators. Kraidy brings to evidence Omar Abulmaged's
April 2, 2014, court sentence in consequence of the latter calling his donkey
Sisi and adorning its head with a military cap. The case underlines a situation
stretching decades before wherein Egyptians used to deride President Hosni
Mubarek as the laughing cow, imitating the famous French cheese commercial
brand, La vache qui rit. The third trope combines the serious and
the sarcastic through nude art and is spearheaded by the young blogger Alaa
El-Mahdy in her 2011 A Rebel's Diary.
It is not
farfetched to conclude that the early two trope variations pave the way for the
third, assumedly the most enigmatic and puzzling. Thus, The Naked
Blogger of Cairo "explores the mixture of activism and artistry
characteristic of revolutionary expression and tracks the social transformation
of activism into Art and ensuring controversies." (p. 5) Towards this end,
Kraidy finds that creative insurgency cannot be restricted as an instantiation
of one artistic expression or another. A fair analysis of that creative
insurgency's emergence must grapple with the one it finds confusing.
Interestingly, El-Mahdy's nude photo is compared with other creative
expressions from the mother of all revolutions, the French one, zooming on
Eugène Delacroix's La liberté guidant le Peuple (1830).
With the
human body as the governing principle for a creative insurgency, The
Naked Blogger of Cairo lies in four sections with an introduction and
conclusion. The introduction "In the Name of the People" highlights a
problem: Why is the body so fundamental to the Arab uprisings? Furthermore,
"How does the rise of digital culture complicate our understanding of the
body in revolutionary times?" (p. 12) Standing in awe of the naked
blogger, Kraidy develops: "by inviting both moral opprobrium and threats
of physical oblivion, al-Mahdy's digital nude selfie had immediate rhetorical
and physical consequences." (p. 18) Understandably, the sky is the limit
for the readers' expectations to find all those rhetorical and physical
consequences.
Section
One: "Burning Man" zooms into the visible and invisible dimensions of
radical militancy, mostly in Tunisia, namely Bouazizi's act of
self-inflammation. Kraidy finds the act has been less directed toward the
dictator's stifling renditions of the country and more against his countrymen's
approach to that stifling as a fait accomplait. Section Two:
"Laughing Cow" invests in the opposite direction of section one. The
gradual mode of activism, namely the sarcastic laugher, and mostly in Egypt.
Like radical militancy, sarcasm too hinges on the body politics, and Kraidy
finds that armed with only sarcasm and laughter, ordinary Egyptians have defied
megalomaniacs ever since pharaonic times.
Section
Three: "Puppets and Masters" explains how the human body is often at
ease with both moods of expression: the radical and the sarcastic. As a result,
revolutionary or creative insurgency chooses to mix the extreme with the
gradual, using examples from Tunisia, Egypt, global activism, and the French
Revolution. Understandably, the chapter prepares readers to register the
content of the following section. With Section Four: "Virgins and Vixens",
comes Kraidy's opportune time to sell readers the presumed seriousness of
bodily undressing. Through a rhetorical phraseology, the author succeeds in
affecting an aura of seriousness by what political scientists qualify as the
blind spot of the king's two bodies. The blind spot—understood to be the king's
male organ since it is only this organ that puts him on the same bar with other
humans—facilitates the acceptance, even the balancing, of naked activism with
all political, aesthetic, and ethical militancy.
"Requiem
for a Revolution" or the conclusion asks whether simply women's bodies are
engaged in men's political tussles less to liberate women and more to galvanize
the populace around what is ultimately men's fixation on power. Women's bodies
become tools whereby women are ultimately emptied of subjectivity and the
capacity for free thinking and decision-making.
In order
to make space for the voyeuristic and the sensational, Kraidy has to beat about
the bush and lecture readers about the uses and abuses of body politics so that
his rendering of the Arab uprisings may sound plausible. To buy his idea is to
embrace an insult and participate in the still unfolding counterrevolution.
There is simply no way whereby one may even begin to compare the conscious and
principled acts of either Bouazizi, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, or the Kurdish Women of
Kobani fighting ISIS with the nude selfies of El-Mahdy and her several
pretenders. Kraidy does not want to acknowledge that the counterrevolution aims
to cast the class struggle as a gender, race, or faith struggle. The further to
stay away from the class struggle, the safest the counterrevolution remains. To
equate Bouazizi's act with El-Mahdy's is to participate in distortion as
perpetuated by the false omnipresent and to ensure that the narrative of the
revolutionaries of Tahrir and elsewhere will stay forever tarnished and
uninviting.
Quite the
contrary, the revolution precipitates a world order that does not call for
spectacles and where bodies are loved, caressed, and cared for in dignity and
mutual love. Only love is revolutionary and triumphant orders presiding over
the false omnipresent always seek to divert attention from true and mutual
love. What does El-Mahdy in her diary preach? In a nutshell, she communicates men-hating
as if the world is short of hatred. Other than seeking to destroy the pillar of
the nonetheless corrupt values of society, her method is hatred. Let us all
recall how revolutionary couples married and committed to sacral (not sacred)
vows and principled living in Tahrir. Their revolutionary friends congratulated
them and savoured the delight of simply witnessing the promise of social love
(not just harmony) and larger emancipations come true. Had Kraidy bothered to
read El-Mahdy's A Rebel's Diary, he would find ages-old litanies
and ill-articulated cliches regarding the alleged oppressive practices of the
Orient.
Again,
had Kraidy bothered, he would have found the right parallel to El-Mahdy's
selfie, Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1834),
and certainly not La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830). It is
not rocket science to note that with the latter, the bare-chested woman is a
participant in the arduous struggle and an active one, for that matter, against
forces of regression. Perhaps, she was among the group of women protestors whom
Louis XVI famously ordered croissants au beurre when they were
dying for lack of bread, showcasing the sovereign's divorce from reality which
ultimately sealed his fate for good. With Femmes d'Alger, one traces
a process that eventually propagated into El-Mahdy's selfie: the fetishizing
principle, the need for a mysterious form of freedom, and freedom in Capital as
slavery since both Algerian or Egyptian men do not know how to handle/to man
their women. Hence, the reason why these women are slowly rotting in the harem.
Only Capital—the logic in the selfie and the classical painting—is savvy and
reliable when extracting value from these oriental women. What is most painful
is the self-Orientalizing act that academics and serious academic publishing
such as Harvard UP deem liberating and introduce it to the world as such.
But since
the neoliberal order glamorizes El-Mahdy's daring act, Kraidy could see no
alternative but to give his final assault and insult "… most revolutionary
martyrs-at-large were dead and clothed men, whereas the emergence of women as
icons in the Arab uprisings tended to result from their disrobement." (p.
13) How else to read this statement other than a reproduction of the patriarchal
mindset that Tahrir revolutionaries brazenly fought against? Besides the
insult, disrobement is glamorized because it is the only way to ensure the
restructuring of capital forces and the valuation of surplus value. Every
rebel-à-la-El-Mahdy labour is further devalued, literally prostituting workers,
even those who never heard of El-Mahdy. How else to afford the imagined
independence of one's place except through increasingly lower
wages?
Fouad
Mami
Université d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
Eid
Mohamed and Ayman A. El-Desouky (eds.) 2021. Cultural Production and Social
Movements after the Arab Spring: Nationalism, Politics, and Transnational
Identity. I.B. Tauris, London and New York.
The
keyword for this edited volume is transnational. It deploys the transnational
as a cultural output of the Arab Spring, the popular uprisings that swept
several countries in the Middle East and North Africa in two waves, the initial
one in 2011 and the latest in 2019. Interestingly and to the exception of one
single essay by Hager Ben Driss on the poetry of Tunisian Sghaier Ouled Ahmed's
incendiary poetry, all contributions seem to be fascinated with works that are
either a celebration of multiculturalism or transhistorical. In doing so, their
essays are narcissistic projections of what the editors aim for the Arab Spring
to be remembered, a culturalist quest for some mysteriously lost and regained
identity, the one caught between past and present, modernity or traditionalism.
In reality, though, these projections, regardless of how apparently nuanced or
informative, stand at odds with the core principle of the uprisings: a class
struggle seeking the foundation of an egalitarian society.
The
editors start with the premise that the social explosions, otherwise dubbed the
Arab Spring, cannot be explained by postcolonial or nationalistic theories. The
latter are anachronistic and unhelpful. The uprisings, they add, far supersede
the capacity of a single idea or approach to account for the ideological,
cultural, historical, or economic realities "that have unsettled the power
structures of state formations and processes of subjectivation…" (p. 1).
It is not difficult to note that the book's core question veers into an
identity quest imagined to require assimilation to European multiculturalism,
or so the material advances of Europe are supposed to be premised. For purposes
of lending that quest a heavy and serious endeavour, the book hinges its
rationale on "…the deeper reality [that is supposed to have fueled the
uprisings, precisely those] …collective modes of knowing, and of knowing
collectively, beyond institutional politics, national and postcolonial
histories, and the established discursive modes of expert sciences and
intellectual discourses." (p. 2) Hence, the preaching of transcultural is
almost in tandem with the reigning neoliberal order, which seeks to
simultaneously resolve two contradictions: the fall in the rate of profits and
the squashing of the class struggle through banalising immigrants and immigration
as a free and conscientious choice. With one contribution, Katie Logan, one
cannot overlook in her reading of Etel Adnan's 1993 novel, Paris, When
It's Naked, an infantile admiration of the European Union and an
evocation of reproducing the 'melting pot' in the Arab World.
Western
discourses of social mobilisations, the editors trust, cannot account for the
recent changes taking place in the MENA region. Social movements such as the
ones that spearheaded the studied uprisings are presumed to have become
governed by new modes of social mobilisation, namely the internet. Hence, there
is little, if at all, historical continuity between past and present struggles
in the Arab World. The book lies in four parts, comprising twelve chapters:
four in the first and third and two in the second and the fourth. They are
contributions by scholars of social and human sciences.
The first
part trusts that the Arab Spring marks the emergence of a multiplicity:
ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, and gender-based.
It claims to find and marshal a methodology rooted in the dynamics of the Arab
Spring. A methodology that breaks away with the old norms of study
"…sublimation of the Other—and especially of the United States as
pervasive—has built an idea of fragile Arab communities… [together with] the
emergence of the digital citizen opens ways for conceiving oneself differently
from decades--, if not centuries—old narratives." (p. 23) Through
shuttling back and forth from the mother countries to the hosting places,
Diaspora communities are deemed to facilitate the perceived need for change.
Thus, the transcultural reality fueled exasperation with the likes of Mubarek
and Ghaddafi, and triggered a new mode of digital citizenship that undid censorship
and broke rigid borders. Caroline Rooney, in her contribution, proposes that
even old enmities (Jewish and Arab) are no longer operative, and the new
generations are receptive to the undoing of political manoeuvrings and
discourses.
Part II
investigates a culture's diversifying and assimilative practices that help to
re-narrate identity after traumas. At stake in this is a rethinking of the idea
of inclusiveness." (p. 5) Negotiating a new, universal identity
wherein Facebook plays a key role is what Ben Driss notices in
the poetry of Sghair Ouled Ahmed (201). This poet used to write with a
universal audience in mind for which he sought not only solidarity but the need
to register a different hypothesis or vocabulary with which he, the poet,
"…rectif[ies] the Western grammar of revolution." (p. 84) In the name
of reclaiming one's history and saving it from the falsifications by victors,
Jeanna Altomonte finds the Iraqi artist, Adel Abidin's 2007 interactive
installation, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad a recreation
of Iraq and Baghdad's millennial history in Western capitals. With its
subversive character to neo-Oriental tropes pushed by heavy Western media,
Adidin's installation is supposed to "…promote social and political change
in regions affected by war." (p. 102). The logic of the essay goes assumes
that the simple fact of living outside Iraq (in diaspora) facilitates new
esteem for the Iraqi as a productive and respectable subject.
Part III
highlights how migration enforces the sociopolitical collision around issues of
cultural identity. As Melissa Finn and Bessma Momani argue, Settling in Canada
surveys over 860 Canadian-Arab youth to explore the possibility of a
transnational outlook on oneself and others through metissage.
Differently put, in being a hybrid, that is, both Arab and Canadian, one leaves
the parochial and ravishes inclusive, "…demarcating the inside and outside
of cultural boundaries, and choosing positions on an issue-by-issue
basis." (p. 121)
Part IV
stands apart from the other three sections in how it claims that
"…identity is a false problematic." (p. 7) and where the staging of
the revolutionary/protest act in the artistic work cannot be taken for granted.
The Houthi sarkha (scream) is found to be a self-contradiction
in movement in the sense that it "serves the Houthi's solidification of
power but not without rendering the sarkha's context of the
struggle against violations of Yemen's sovereignty meaningless." (p. 206)
Embraced as an identity, the chapter finds that sarkha's capacity
for galvanising the struggle for life in dignity is a false radicalism because
it reduces complex history and culture into a follower of either the Sunni brand
of Islam or Zaydi Shia. Hamid Dabashi's essay on the art of protest
carries out this section's investigation of falsehood. He finds that radical
art is precisely the one that cannot be recuperated and championed by museums
and art galleries because that radical art lies at the interstitial and
transitory, "specific to the moment of their staging" (p. 236). The
'interstitial' is his term for the truly subversive art as it haunts
counterrevolutionary forces, the ones that have feasted on the Arab Spring's
propulsion for emancipation.
In asking
what is about the self-immolation of a single man in Tunisia that sparkled the
revolution in Egypt and elsewhere, the first section finds that the answer lies
with the emergent trans-cultural identities in the Arab World and beyond. What
an elusive approximation to a point-black question! Instead of discussing the
dictatorial orders as the latter unflinchingly pursued the extraction of
surplus value/profit, thus stifling the possibility of mere survival, the
contributions in the section project their own biases and jumpstart singing the
song of capital, rendering the incendiary radicalism a quest for a
transcultural identity and self-referentiality. The fluidity of movements is
supposed to combat "the essentialism, ghettoisation and
fundamentalism." (p. 14) Any objective reader cannot miss the insult to
the sacrifices of the activists who paraded the squares and streets of Egypt,
Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. It is fallacious to assume that
technology (social media) galvanises the rebellious subject. Rather, the
burdensome thresholds of exploitation and grab cancelled the possibility of
decent living and triggered the way for a social explosion.
Resisting
the tendency to represent and reproduce the revolutionary act, as with the
fourth section, sound like a promising venue to embrace the universal. In
practice, though, the area veers into the irreproducibility of the
revolutionary act, less to give people the opportunity to register the act and
more to fetishise it. The alleged distinction between the act and the reporting
of the act reads as infinite masturbation with words. Indeed, how can one
celebrate the photo of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh's last breath or the one picturing
Kurdish women of Kobani standing up to ISIS as the most radical with the same
zeal as the nude photos of Alaa Elmahdy or Goldshifteh Farahani's? Dabashi
overlooks how the radicality in each contradicts the other in balancing the two
as even remotely comparable. al-Sabbagh's paves the road for the incendiary. At
the same time, Elmahdy veers into voyeuristic and spectacle hence, how an
authentic work of art has to reproduce the emergency, not just the emergence,
of the revolutionary act.
Overall,
the transnational and transhistorical as championed in this book seek to
dispose of the incendiary content of the uprisings surgically. In making the
uprisings look like an orgy for metissage, historical and
intergenerational continuity is the target since only the one who embraces
their history can convincingly shout 'no' to the neoliberal order. One cannot
possibly develop the same stance toward their two histories—even if awareness
is possible, acting and standing for the two roots is impossible. Sometimes, if
not often, the two roots are mutually exclusive. That explains why metissage,
transhistorical, and transcultural are the darling ideologies of the current
neoliberal and counterrevolutionary orders
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
Zegart,
Amy. B. 2022. Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American
Intelligence. Princeton University Press. pp. 424
Amy
Zegart, in this study, proposes reshaping American intelligence institutions to
meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. America boasts of exactly
eighteen agencies, but instead of aspiring awe or efficacy, the number should
underline the limitations of the current structuring of intelligence bodies.
Since each apparatus was added after a major failure, the lingering challenges
remain unsurmountable, and the strategic advantage over adversaries is unmet.
The challenge facing the intelligence community and America now lies less in
half-hearted coordination work between diverse and specialised agencies and
more in the fundamental contradiction between business and national interests.
The two claims are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled. Unless some
formula is found to harness business for the nation's benefit, the intelligence
agencies' operations will stay largely dysfunctional and bypassed by tenacious
adversaries.
With
eighteen intelligence agencies and the result is America is underperforming.
Zegart thinks this is a lingering and counterproductive Cold War mindset. In
the age of open-source information, with the internet doubling its volume of
knowledge every two years, secrecy, the cornerstone of all eighteen bodies,
emerges as a certain way towards disaster. Teenagers using Google Earth and
other freely available and inexpensive applications can now perform feats that
used to consume considerable time and Personale. In this environment where
anyone can spy, and everyone with a reasonable set of skills can access
sensitive data, secrecy is a liability. And as such, the intelligence community
needs to harness the courage to rethink its work.
To mount
her revamp proposal, Zegart deploys ten chapters, introduction and conclusion
included. She lays out the problem of her argument slowly in "Intelligence
Challenges in the Digital Age: Cloaks, Daggers, and Tweets." The first of
these challenges is power. Being powerful translates not only invincibility but
also vulnerability. The second is democratised data which the internet
revolution has introduced. Satellite images from Google Earth are perfect.
Anyone with a computer and connection can monitor what Iran, North Korea, or
any other government does not share. No state monopoly over access to sensitive
information is possible. This leads us to the third challenge, which is
secrecy. In the past, maintaining secrecy gave an advantage in intelligence
collection tasks. Now, secrecy is almost detrimental because no government can
entirely protect its power grids, financial records, or start-up inventions—all
of which can be accessed online—by disengaging or "standing apart
from" (p. 8) the world. Hence, why private actors such as Facebook,
Amazon, and Google, among others, should be involved in securing America as
most cutting-edge technologies can be used and often are used as weapons
against American interests. Similarly, this is why secrecy in the old sense
translates to disadvantages that severely hurt U.S. interests. A lot of
catching up is facing the U.S. intelligence community concerning secrecy.
Chapter
two: "The Education Crisis: How Fictional Spies are Shaping Public Opinion
and Intelligence Policy." Here, Zegart addresses the inhibitive impact of
Hollywood in the sense that spy entertainment (she calls it: 'spytainment')
provides a completely distorted image of intelligence work. Equally damaging,
spytainment clouds public perceptions of the real challenges facing America.
Fiction maintains the myth that America is invulnerable le whereas, in reality,
America is vulnerable. Besides, Hollywood fuels conspiracy theories such as
President Trump's conviction of Deep State rhetoric and plotting against his
policies. With conspiracy roaming wide, congressmen and judges tend to believe
spytainment flat plotlines, featuring "heroes, escapism and the triumph of
good over evil" (p. 26) more than intelligence reports they have access
to. Clouded in secrecy, the culture of the supremacy of the intelligence
agencies set in motion through fantasised decades of intelligence success
during the Cold War does not help break the ingrained myths.
To get a
consistent picture of U.S. intelligence, Chapter three, "American
Intelligence History at a Glance: From Fake Batteries to Armed Drones." In
providing a snapshot of the development of intelligence institutions since
Geroge Washington, Zegart aims to remind policymakers and the general public alike
that America is vulnerable. In its brief intelligence history, America could
not bridge over halted development, organisational fragmentation, and
democratic tension. During peace times, before World War II, America had the
habit of dismantling its spy bodies. Whatever experience gets accumulated, it
is soon lost to the wind. Besides and a latecomer in the spy industry, America
should not be engrossed with its Cold War success, particularly when compared
with countries such as China, a millennial history of warfare and intelligence.
The rules of the games are quickly changing, and America—Zegart never tires of
reminding—should not sleep on past feats. Again, Zegart hammers how
technological advances are more disorienting than conducive to any strategic
advantage. In her opinion, intelligence agencies should resist the temptation
to violate their mission as information-gathering bodies, giving
decision-makers an informational gift.
Chapter
four: "Intelligence Basics: Knowns and Unknowns" Here, Zegart dispels
myths from reality and underlines how intelligence operates in practice. The
three core missions: the analytic, the human, and the operational, interact to
make any intelligence agency what it is now. The analysis is geared toward
giving policymakers an "advantage over adversaries." (p. 79) For
successful executions of analytic missions, one has to be aware of the fine
distinction between knowns and unknowns. Intelligence now, we find, is not
necessarily the amassing of secrets, and as such, it cannot be confused with
policymaking. The mission's human side sheds light on various motivations and
traits, animating the analyst, the officer, and the informant. We read too
about how intelligence officers balance their jobs with their private lives.
There is a section on how officers grapple with moral dilemmas. In carrying out
their mission, intelligence agencies handle interrogations of detainees. Still,
evidence often amounts to no more than a good bet since cases where conclusive
evidence can be reached is rare. Zegart finds that the golden rule with
intelligence professionals is ways of "…challenging their prevailing
hypotheses." (p. 103)
Chapter
five: "Why Analysis is so Hard: The Seven Deadly Biases", is key to
the book's overall thesis. Given the abundance of open-source data, the chapter
seeks to answer why analysis has become excessively hard. Other than outside
compromises, Zegart outlines the sinister role of seven deadly biases. Even
when an institution is sure it has neutralised internal endemics such as "bureaucratic
turf protection, agency cultures, career incentives, ingrained habits, and a
desire for autonomy" (p. 114), not a simple task. However, it can move on
to work on the seven biases. These last range from confirmation bias, optimism
bias, availability bias, fundamental attribution error, mirror imaging, framing
biases, and groupthink, to the secret for super forecasting (p. 136). The key
strategy to outsmart these biases lies in encouraging dissent, finding a team
of experts that reviews an intelligence case and makes the opposite argument on
the devil's behalf. She similarly notes that advances in artificial
intelligence can help overcome human limitations.
Chapter
six: "Counter-intelligence: To Catch a Spy", grapples with traitors'
motivations and how intelligence officers recruit informants in the digital
age. We read that "China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran are among the most
aggressive foreign intelligence services seeking to steal American secrets. Of
them, China stands apart as the most serious counter-intelligence threat.
American military experts have said that there isn't a single major Chinese
weapons system that isn't based on stolen U.S. technology." (pp.146-7) The
chapter elaborates on early tell-tale signs for suspecting, investigating, and uncovering
sell-outs (or molls in intelligence jargon) without compromising trust among
intelligence community members. Three counter-intelligence challenges are:
trusting too much, paranoia: or trusting too little, and technology that made
it possible to recruit assets from afar. Technology makes it equally likely to
incur considerable damage if a trusted insider breaches their trust oath. For
example, we read how the damage done by turncoats such as Snowden has been
irreparable.
Chapter
seven: "Covert Action: A Hard Business of Agonising Choices", studies
those undercover operations that aim to serve a certain line of policy but
which can either be claimed or officially disowned depending on interest, not
on success or failure. The operation that killed Bin Laden counts as one, but
so is the CIA's funnelling of money to help Italy's Christian Democratic Party
to win parliamentary elections back in 1947. (p. 174) Since only the president
can authorise covert actions, the chapter weighs those uneasy choices presidents
take or circumvent to serve a policy. When all policy lines have been tried and
extinguished, covert actions serve as the last resort. How drone technology and
the war on terror have been operating forces policymakers to face how the
blurring of intelligence and military mandates is counterproductive.
Chapter
eight: "Congressional Oversight: Eyes on Spies", recounts that as
lawmakers, congressmen are not trained or sufficiently motivated to do the
oversight work stipulated by the constitution. Zegart summarises three
challenges facing congressional intelligence committees in three words: information, incentives,
and institutions (p. 198). Given the inhibitive influence of
spytainment and the poor payoff from carrying out proper oversight on intelligence
agencies, Zegart observes an information and motivational lag beneath
successive congressional committees charged with cross-checking intelligence
agencies. Besides, she highlights a structural and deeper problem of these
committees' culture that does not encourage rigorous second opinions about the
work of intelligence agencies. The compounding effect from the three challenges
explains the scandals, such as the presumed weapons of mass destruction owned
by Iraq. In short, one comes face to face with how policy becomes outpaced by
technology.
Chapter
nine: "Intelligence Isn't Just for Governments Anymore: Nuclear Sleuthing
in a Google Earth World", further advances the cause of renovating U.S.
intelligence. Underneath the chapter lies, a call for humility as
"estimating nuclear threats is hard. Assessing the intelligence track
record is, too." (p. 230) A new phenomenon, democratising intelligence,
breaches governments' monopoly over sensitive information. Low-cost satellites
with competitive image capacity than military satellites are routinely put in
orbit. Machine learning and computer modelling enhance surface-to-air missile
launching site identification for anyone with an internet connection and the
patience for tracking terrestrial alterations. Hobbyists using only Google
Earth images can chase Iran or North Korea's uranium-enrichment facilities and
the activities taking place therein. Once the intelligence ecosystem is widely
open to non-governmental actors, intelligence policy has to accommodate the
informal branch lest the latter adds salt to injury by encroaching unforeseen
and further damage beyond malign actors in the pay of foreign intelligence
agencies.
Chapter
ten: "Decoding Cyber Threats" here, the argument runs that
cyber-threats have opened the door for a new generation of warfare rooted in
deception, sabotage, and misinformation. Hacking and deepfake can sow the seeds
of social discord and upheaval. The examples with which Zegart illustrates her
point are telling. Shadowy Kremlin-backed organisations armed with automated
Facebook accounts or bots sow discord in American cities. The intelligence
community registers the 2016 presidential elections as a cyber Pearl Harbor. We
read too that "China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of
intellectual property, including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35
and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs." (pp. 261-2) Without the
cooperation of the private sector with state agencies, such complex
intelligence challenges triggered by the digital age cannot be met, and the
cost will be American democracy and liberalism. This explains Zegart's initial
call to rethink the structuring of intelligence agencies along lines that do
not abandon Cold War methods but without overlooking the need to engage with
open-source data and other unorthodox initiatives.
The book
draws on thirty years of research experience, advising the U.S. government, and
hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence people. As a career
academic, Zegart comes as an outsider, but that counts to her advantage since
probably only an outsider can reflect on that, which makes the institution's
chances of facing the new threats pretty grim.
Contrary
to Hollywood's overblown portrayals of American invincibility, the records of
American intelligence agencies, though professional and functional, are far
from adequate to meet cyber threats and other challenges put by the digital
age. What Zegart has in mind is the recent failure as America's spy network has
been blown, hence, how the call for renovation and accommodation to the
new-brave world reality is nothing short of a call for revolution. In
outlining, "Today's technological demands, though, are even greater
because there are more breakthrough technologies. They're spreading faster and
further. They're inherently hard to understand. They're driven by commercial
companies seeking global markets, not governments seeking national security."
(p. 222), we realise that Zegart has touched on the core of the problem.
America is experiencing a self-contradiction in movement: the forces of
nationalism against globalism. The American establishment can no longer
postpone the question: are they for American capitalism or capitalism without
qualifiers?
All else,
such as debates over the competency of congressional oversight, cyber threats,
and breaches of secrecy, are secondary and disappear once the earlier question
is resolved. Addressing the efficiency of democratic measures in the form of
congressional oversight to prevent personal or institutional abuses become a
liability, a crippling structure. Because authoritarian regimes are free from
similar democratic stipulations in their accountability system, they have an
advantage over America.
Indeed,
it is not the lack of patriotism and sense of national service among those
heading tech companies (p. 276) that drives the present fixation on U.S.
intelligence. Predisposed to markets, tech companies' allegiance resonates with
clients, not citizens. To account for this contradiction, Zegart improvises an
implicit willingness to sacrifice democracy that "[o]versight has rarely
worked well because the sources of dysfunction run deep—in information,
incentive, and institution." (p. 224) Other than being a discreet call for
jingoism, the problem with the book is that it sees intelligence agencies and
the state that these agencies presumably protect as independent totalities. The
successes of World War II and the Cold War were dictated by economic miracles
as U.S. companies, not the U.S. government, beat up all competitors (foes and
allies alike) combined. These companies' hunt for profit now presupposes any
allegiance to the state as a mechanism that leads to asphyxiation. Between
asphyxiation and global growth, tech companies have chosen the latter. Given
this context, the state with its eighteen intelligence bodies can do very
little except postpone, not reverse, the collapse of the Westphalian state
order. Instead of addressing the major transformation ahead, Zegart
contemplates how companies should be loyal.
Fouad Mami
Université d’Adrar (Algeria)
Basu
Thakur, Gautam. 2021. Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus. State
University of New York Press, Albany, NY. pp. 276.
Under
neoliberalism, Basu Thakur finds, postcolonial theory has become a race for
victimhood, “a brand of culturalism…” (p. xxiii). Following Gayatri Spivak’s
specification that subalternity is a position and not an identity, Basu Thakur
argues that postcolonialism has drifted into conceiving subalternity as an
identity in practice. That explains why it has become anti-emancipatory.
Relying on insights from psychoanalysis, Basu Thakur finds that postcolonial
writers have to conceive identity as an ontological lack to be truly
empowering. Indeed, it does not behove contemporary Indians or Algerians to
merely reinstate the Other, the colonial master, by some postcolonial
acolytes-disguised-as-authors. This is so because the Other remains rooted in
fantasy, functioning as a governing structure that lacks substance. This
explains why the best policy for decolonised peoples is neither to disavow nor
take the European worldview seriously. Instead of addressing the lack on which
postcolonial subjectivity sits as a frightening void, the book encourages
readers to view it as a call toward universalism, a step toward revoking both
the coloniser and the colonised.
Basu
Thakur proceeds by reconciling what are considered irreconcilable disciplines:
postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. He finds that the two fields share common
ground more than what each avows. The book is divided into two sections: the
first contains three chapters and the second two plus a conclusion. The
chapters in the first explain why postcolonial writers cannot counter the
ontological challenge posed by the big Other. The second section teases how
neoliberal modes of expression perpetuate the colonial/oriental project,
thereby testifying to how the colonised/decolonised remains crippled with the
same ontological fixation.
Chapter
One: “The Subaltern Act of Freedom” distinguishes between acting out, ‘the
passage to the act’ and act in Lacan’s theory of the Act in the sense that the
first two never challenge the Other because they maintain the fantasy, whereas
‘to act’ is to decimate both the big Other and the imagination. Basu Thakur
illustrates this point with one subaltern character, Draupadi, in Mahasweta
Devi’s story with the same title, wherein the subaltern abolishes politics by
putting the signifier’s symbolic order under duress. The revolutionary
dimension in Draupadi’s act is specifically that one that does not solicit
recognition; its spontaneous and eruptive unfolding breaks the monopoly over
the symbolic framework because the master signifier through the show is deeply
shaken. Indirectly Basu Thakur is telling readers that postcolonial texts fall
below this bar set by Mahasweta.
Chapter
Two: “Postcolonial. Animal. Limit” revises postcolonial to criticism by claiming
that the real animal is the one whose capacities escape humans’ imaginary: it
shocks and destabilises the seemingly ever-strong symbolic order. (p. 36) only
to learn that all extended orders remain rooted in lack. Only fantasy exhibits
the Other’s apparent invisibility. Through a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s story,
the postcolonial animal interpreted through a pterodactyl underlies less and
less the occasional failures of language by zooming on the expressive
shortcomings of language. Encountering the flying demon uncovers the
impossibility of representing the condition of subalternity. In as much as it
is real, not a symbol, the radical alterity in the pterodactyl remains an
insult to subjectivity; it disrupts facile renderings and certainly cancels the
capacity of representation to render any experience translucent. The animal’s
death drive can be effectively countered through “explosive love” (p. 44),
never through desire, allowing readers to confront universally traumatic
nothingness.
Chapter
Three: “Hysterization of Postcolonial Studies; or, Beyond Cross-Cultural
Communication” builds on the Lacanian principle wherein people “…desire to
remain in desire without satisfaction…” (p. 68). The author finds that the
colonial archiving of knowledge is fundamentally rooted in nuisance or that
excessive enjoyment from the dream of controlling the colonised. But this
orientalist project wherein knowledge is sought less for its own sake and more
for domination remains paradoxically an expression of lack and non-being
besetting the master signifier. The evidence from reading Leila Aboulela’s “The
Museum” and Tony Gatlif’s film, Gradjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger, 1997), shows
that the archive amassed to qualify for cross-cultural communication miserably
fails. Hence, how postcolonial theory, when restricted to answering back, is
destined to remain a self-defeating endeavour. Only the willing blind refuses
to note that the archive cannot be exhaustive. By extension, a counter archive
similarly expresses hysteria that craves acknowledgement from the Other’s
symbolic order.
Chapter
Four: “Fictions of Katherine Boo’s Creative Non-Fiction, or, The Unbearable
Alterity of the Other” reads an American journalist’s Behind the Beautiful
Forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Basu Thakur finds
that neoliberal accounts have remained consistent with colonial narratives
regarding how oriental spaces remain marred in poverty. Instead of chastising
capitalism for the proletarization of India’s undercity, the report underlines
postcolonial mismanagement and the elites’ corruption. White supremacists
remain incapable of noting that the impoverished multitudes in Calcutta and
other cities are essential to the prosperity of residents of upscale
neighbourhoods in Mumbai or New Delhi in the sense that the two antagonistic
sights go together. Narrative accounts wherein poverty is humanised, such as in
Boo’s, risk “gutturalising the politics of globalisation by strategically
redrawing the phantasmatic screen of third world abjection over the real
conditions of global inequality suffered in the third world.” (p. 108). The
argument wherein only in India (or other decolonised spaces) where corruption
explains sights of depravation fortifies the idea that the West cannot tolerate
despicable depravities because only the West/Other knows how to address gross
economic inequalities systematically.
Chapter
Five: “Political Correctness Is Phallic: Idaho Politics, Black Panther, and
Gran Torino”, considers how representational politics, as shown in these films,
facilitates disengagement from reality and remains complicit with
neoliberalism. As displayed in these films, the conflict between communities is
geared less toward provoking audiences to register the injustice of political
choices but is precisely directed toward culturising injustice. The films serve
as an ideological apparatus obfuscating the precariat’s chances of reversing
their misfortunes by feeding them the illusion that solid opportunities are
waiting for them just around the corner if they only stay patient. Meanwhile,
the neoliberal order remains untouched. Instead of highlighting
institutionalised segregation or the ensuing discrimination that followed the
formal abolishment of slavery, Black Panther reverses the typical image by
showing the imaginary African republic of “Wakanda as a site of pure
plenitude.” (p. 148) But the technologically advanced Africa and Africans are
nowhere nearly helpful or emancipatory as ‘Africa-as-the-heart-of-darkness’
since it is still through fantasy that the West mediates Africa. Readers reach
this understanding that whoever seeks an acknowledgement from the master
signifier is counterrevolutionary.
The
Conclusion: “Particular Universal” underlines how postcolonial writers’
penchant for competing representations of misery and victimhood subscribes to
the logic of illogic wherein gratification is expected and generated from the
Other’s acknowledgement. Besides illustrating how this logic is sick, the
conclusion claims how this logic enforces the other’s phallic image and
justifies postcolonial oppression. Differently put, no matter how exhaustive
the native informants’ knowledge of the subaltern will be, that knowledge stays
rooted in lack and has to be mediated through fantasy. The subaltern cannot be
reduced to any set of archives or manuals. The particularity of the urban
precariat stands for the new universal. Following Žižek, Basu Thakur credits
Malcolm X for accurately seizing on the radical understanding wherein “…the
only possibility of moving forward lies through embracing the negation,
claiming it as part of one’s identity, hence the ‘X’ in his name.” (p. 192)
When
reading Basu Thakur’s volume, the reader cannot avoid the question, why would
one seek to fix a theory by invigorating it with another one? But lest one
precipitates, what seems like a fixation on the palliative is found out to be
indeed revolutionary. Similarly, there are several instances of convoluted
writing like in: “This is not freedom in the sense of Liberty as a metaphysical
attribute. But, rather, freedom here is action illuminating the lack of
freedom.” (p. 28), where they attempt to follow through the prose becomes a
challenge. But soon, Basu Thakur’s discussion of his selected fiction comes to
the reader’s rescue, convincing us to remain glued to the book. Indeed, Basu
Thakur’s reading of Mahasweta’s Draupadi reads to me (at least) like the
Tunisian Bouazizi, the man who inflamed himself in December 2010: an act that
deposed several dictators. I could not overlook this quote: “By erasing their
bodies to correspond with their already erased speech, that is, unravelling the
body as an object of speech, the subaltern shocks the big Other. Their wanton
disregard for the body delivers a traumatic truth. Namely, there’s a difference
between having and being a body.” (p. 7). Insights such as these underline the
author’s insistence on historical totality and the class dimension in the
precariat’s misfortune with which he reinvents communism from the debris of
postcolonialism and neoliberalism. How can readers afford to bypass Basu
Thakur’s insights as to the latter recall Marx and Engels’ underscoring of the
class struggle? Only that Postcolonial Lack deploys a different approach to
solve the same theorem.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Colonists
Exact Stakes and the Untold Story of Algeria’s Independence
Albert
Camus (1913-1960), a Nobel Laureate for literature, was born and raised in
colonial Algeria. He is largely considered in independent Algeria as the
spokesperson of white settlers, perhaps even the pride of a social class better
known as Les pieds noirs. The latter underlines the descendants of
white settlers or colonists (French but also other Europeans) who joined the
colony after the conquest of Algeria in 1830. Almost all of them acquired the
most fertile land at a fraction of the cost following the decimation of Arab
tribes and the ruinous policies that led to the dispossession of the remaining
inhabitants from their communal lands. In the literature about the period, the
first colonists are branded as pioneers. They worked the land and rendered it
extremely productive.
It was
rumoured during the 1930s that if America was proud of California, then France
was proud of Orléansville, today’s the governorate of Chelf and the region
around, spreading from Oran in the West to Médéa in the East. True, these
colonists were industrious, but they too exploited the dispossessed native
population. Russian convicts, who lived through the reign of the last Tsar and
were serving prison terms around the 1910s in Bône (today’s Annaba), were
shocked to find that the colonists treated Algerians worse than sheep.[1] With
the end of military rule in the 1880s, colonists (not Metropolitan France) were
responsible—through exclusionary practices—for literally sending Algerians
behind the sun. Understandably, by the time the Algerian revolution broke out
in November 1954, everything the colonists fought and stood for became at
stake. Most of them, at that point, had been four generations in the colony.
To give
non-Algerian and non-French readers a foretaste of la déchirure or
the disheartening misfortune of these colonists brought about by Algeria’s
independence in 1962, consider this analogy. In South Africa, Nelson Mandella
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace simply because he did not repeat the
Algerian tragedy. Mandella kept intact the economic privileges white colonists
enjoyed during the apartheid. He did not start a policy or propagate a process
leading to their eventual eviction or dispossession. White liberals and their
media adore Mandella for not doing what the FLN is thought to have done with
white colonists three decades earlier.
Here
enters Camus’s conciliatory discourse during Algeria’s war of independence. He
is notoriously famous/infamous for adopting his mother’s point of view at the
expense of justice.[2] Because
I hailed from the very people sent behind the sun by Camus’ ancestors, I find
any engagement with that ‘justice versus mother’ discussion’ a dead horse. How
so? The terrorism Camus refers to in the quote was not terrorism; these were
some people’s deliberate actions of emancipation to re-enter history after more
than a century of denial. Hence, the euphoric reactions captured through
Algerian songs and other cultural artefacts such as: “يا محمد مبروك عليك الجزائر رجعت ليك”[3] While
a student during the 1990s at Algiers University, I grew up having a part in
several discussions regarding whether or not Camus was a misunderstood
universalist or bloody racist. I can say now that lyricism does not even begin
to approach, let alone solve historical necessities. Reading Camus may make one
more sensible and more sensitive to certain complexities, but at the end of the
day, poetic formulations of his and his like (Mouloud Feraoun, for one) do not
advance the cause of emancipation a single centimetre. Lyrics and poeticism are
what the French brilliantly capture through the expression: des
masturbations a l’infini.
That explains
why there exist perhaps a few solid reasons why the world will want to read one
more book about Camus. Advancing this position, I am aware, comes at the risk
of effecting a major offence to liberal sensibilities since Camus has been the
darling of this class. It is worth knowing that Camus did not hail from these
classes, but he had been accultured—appropriated, if you will, not without his
tacit approval, though, and as such, he becomes an idol for anyone who wants to
change their social skin. With class as a matrix for meaningful analysis, the
methodological line is drawn for what comes below.
Similarly,
it is worth recalling that with the conclusion of the Evian Agreements (Accords
d'Évian), colonists became personas non grata, undesired in a country they
called theirs. Many of them knew no other country to call theirs except
Algeria. Most Algerians perfectly understand and even sympathise with their
misfortune. Strangely, the Evian Agreements guaranteed the colonists’ right to
stay. But it is they who sealed their fate in calling for and acting to keep
Algeria French. Long story short, had they stayed, I and my kind (practically
sons of peasants with living standards barely different from feudal times)
would never have had the chance to make it beyond primary school. Like our
forefathers, we would have been condemned to remain subservient to colonists,
the lowest class on the social ladder. My father was coerced to leave school at
the age of 10, and that is what France was able to offer him and his generation.
Meanwhile,
it is no exaggeration that by literally enslaving Algerians, not a small number
of colonists used to live like royalty. Hence the nostalgia and the rumination
over a French Algeria in contemporary France has been more of a re-memory than
a memory, properly speaking. Knowing that originally these colonists hailed
from peasant and working-class backgrounds, it is understandable what they have
gained and lost. Camus is an icon for everything they aspire to, the self-made
entrepreneurial model.
Now,
concerning how independent Algeria has fared without colonists, that is less
significant to colonists and more appealing to capitalists. Volumes can be
written about dysfunctionalities, imagined or real corruption, and money
laundering. But for the sake of fairness, every Algerian is entitled to free
education, health insurance, dignified lodgings, etc...… Only those blinded
with unsurmountable hatred can deny these relative material gains. Still, the
class struggle remains the perfect arbitration for any measure of success or
failure.
The
predominant nationalist discourse prevailing after independence only seeks to
asphyxiate the class war. Through several slogans, Le hirak (peaceful
uprising) of February 2019 articulated that class dimension. Still, the
triumphant narrative tried and succeeded in portraying it as only an
exasperation with Bouteflika and his cronies. Rather, le hirak expresses
an incendiary insurrection against the entire setup of postcolonial order, not
just about the Bouteflika episode. The muffled class war has its explanation,
which is further elaborated below, but the class dimension after independence
remains there for all to see.
This
leaves subaltern Algerians with no hatred against France or at least they do
not hate France, les français de souche. In this connection, it is
worth recalling that no hatred or admiration exists outside space and time.
Sales of French cars do not compare with Asian ones; Algerians cannot resist
French brands. So is the case with French cheese, delicacies, language,
etiquettes, and above all, the French love for life! For most Algerians
practically leading their daily lives (not when some journalist pushed a
microphone their way), what happened happened, and one cannot sit around crying
over spilt milk or reinvent the wheels of time. Algerians trust in the Hegelian
law of historical necessity (not they know Hegel), through which he means: that
what happened could NOT happen. Still, for historical accuracy and fairness in
judgment: the colonists kept Algerians outside time. This is not some
nationalist ruminating over colonial atrocities to cover for his postcolonial
shortcomings and even crimes!
Ever
since the end of military rule toward the end of the 1880s, the colonists and
their offspring dominated the colonial administration. They made everything in
the book to block the scanty metropolitan policies that aimed to provide, care
for, and ‘civilise’ the native (Algerian) populations regarding schooling and
caring for the health of Les indigènes. Who stood against the
progressive policies of the French state? None but the colonists. In 1962 these
colonists got what they have historically always deserved. Outlining this does
not make Algerians blind to the fact that several colonists served in FLN ranks
and openly supported decolonisation. The violence during the revolution settled
scores; that violence, as Frantz Fanon brilliantly puts it at the beginning
of Les dames de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth),
has purifying effects. No one, no matter how Zen or humanist, could undo that
violence and bloodshed.
To
counteract the sweeping lyricism in Camus’ prose, I always refer for the
benefit of students (most of whom are historically removed from the colonial
context) to the first page in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma. Reading Nedjma’s
first page, one will see how Camus has been out of touch with reality. Camus’
lyricism perfectly fits a middle-class sensibility full of: ‘either and or’,
indecision, and mental fogginess. The first page of Nedjma saves
readers from that fogginess and makes them fully register the class struggle.
One will realise how acute Algerians’ living conditions after 1945 were and how
they were aware of the necessity of bloodshed and violence, not that they liked
it, but because they were squeezed out of options. Kateb Yacine remains a
master had he written only that first page in his career. For there, one
captures Algerians’ logos, the reflective consciousness that looks at the abyss
but is not afraid to tease it out and distil the sensible course of action.
Perhaps, it is not an exaggeration to conclude that Camus does not even begin
to compare with Yacine. If literature is but another means of changing the
world, not just an instantiation of the bourgeois hunt for the beautiful, then
it is Yacine who deserves recognition, not Camus.
Now,
after 1962 and as outlined earlier, one does not need to be an apologist for
the FLN and their misrule. But it is unquestionable that materially speaking,
Algerians fared well under post-independence rule than during colonial times.
Regarding present Franco-Algerian relations, they too cannot be stripped out of
context. Not all the criticisms one reads in the French media are accurate or
innocent or not propaganda. It is not news that there exists corruption in
reporting corruption in Algeria. Many observers recall that the French media
were the first people who brought public attention to overpricing the 1200 km
highway in 2006. Why? French companies, like American, Japanese, and South
Korean, made their bids. But the project was contracted by three large and
state-owned Chinese construction companies and one Japanese. How so? Simply
because Algerian bureaucrats did their job. They handed the project to the
lowest bidder. Like everywhere in the world, the initial fund meant to cover
the construction was not enough, and the contracted companies asked for what
was legally theirs. The highway is not Germany’s Autobahn, but its cost is
reasonable. And the delivered infrastructure is not bad, as is often reported.
Likewise, the French media became furious when the authorities handed the
contract for building the largest damn in the Maghreb, that of Beni Haroun, in
2001 to the Chinese. The contract was mouthwatering, and soon the usual media
faultfinding started. Bouteflika’s reign has been no short of objections, but
it remains a duty to be fair.
Big
contracts for building key infrastructure such as the one outlined above are a
handful of examples of why tensions have always governed the relationship
between independent Algeria and France. The cultural explanation proposed by
the Algerian establishment often aims to confuse, justify, and never explain.
The tension has deep roots in material history and the meaning of primitive
accumulation. The tendential fall in the rate of profits [as specified by Karl
Marx in volume three of Capital] obliges French companies to compete against
more vibrant American and other competitors from around the world for parts of
Algerian markets that dictate the tension. The corruption in corruption-related
discussion seeks to cover that public officials and their cronies’ swindling of
assets, large or small, cannot significantly account for the contradictions in
international trade. And that these contradictions in international trade
cannot be resolved through globalisation (Global Market) since the latter
precipitates an equal standard when contracting from among national capitals—a
situation that remains full of odds and engenders tensions among competing
capitalisms making international trade. To provide a taste of this contradiction,
Algeria’s decision to nationalise its energy sector in February 1971 gave
leverage to American companies at the expense of French ones.
That
explains that if one aims to address the subterranean forces that shape
Franco-Algerian relations, then one has to read and consider the underlying
thesis proposed by Gregory D. Cleva in JFK Algeria Speech (2022).
It is not as if we only want to read the book, but we have to. The gist of it
is how in the wake of that speech, a pattern was set for the relationship not
only between the U.S. and Algeria or the U.S. and France but between Algerian
and French establishments. (the two peoples here are outside the power
equation) Leaving the ephemeral (that which French media deems newsworthy) and
embracing the essential, the JFK Algeria Speech is the way to
go. The intricate web of connections is barely highlighted, let alone
sufficiently addressed neither by staunch Algerian nationalists nor by largely
nostalgic French journalists and academics.
For a
large sway of ordinary Algerians, the FLN eventually won because it forced de
Gaulle to accept negotiations. Under the carpet, however, is how the FLN, by
the time JFK made his speech, was militarily defeated. Remember, it was in the
context soon after the battle of Algiers and when FLN masterminds were chased
down, nearly all of them were decimated. French generals’ strategy to defeat
the insurrection started bearing fruits. And still, the FLN, in the final
analysis, got what it wanted! Strange. Some other forces were working against
French policymakers of the time and in favour of the FLN, not necessarily in
favour of the Algerian people or the revolutionaries. We read in Cleva’s
account that American general consuls in Algiers serving from 1942 to the late
1950s each and all of them played key roles by accurately reporting the
pitfalls of French colonial policies. As a member of the Senate’s committee for
foreign policy and thus a likely candidate for the presidency, JFK formalised
what the American establishment, up to that point, had always wanted and
discreetly planned.
The U.S.
did not emerge from WWII victorious just like that. The world still remembers
how President Donald Trump, in November 2018, reacted to French President
Emmanuel Macron’s allusion to the need to create an independent European army,
a framework outside NATO. Trump angrily retorts: “Without the U.S. help in two
world wars, today’s Parisians would be speaking German.”[4] It
is no secret that between the two world wars, the French establishment was
quickly ageing and bitterly divided. To further
explore this topic, here is a 2006 study: Le choix de la défaite: Les
élites françaises dans les années 1930 by an imminent scholar, Annie
Lacroix-Riz. The
point here is that while the French generals and army overwhelmingly succeeded
in suppressing the insurrection in Algeria, French politicians could not
capitalise on that success because Washington wanted otherwise. The latter
embarked on a decolonisation policy, and not even Britain was immune. India,
the jewel of the empire, won its independence! So, who could openly say no to
Washington? Who could dare? Not even de Gaulle.
With his
return to power in 1958, le generale tried his best to secure
Algeria as French, but eventually, he knew his manoeuvres would amount to a
little showmanship. In mounting a rebellion, the FLN’s gamble, for that is what
it was, somehow ironically paid off. U.S. geostrategic interests wanted an end
to colonisation, lest upheavals and insurrections in the colonies would break
the capitalists’ new orders. Decolonisation as a policy was meant to contain
the colonised, regardless of how on the surface, it gave them better terms (not
the best) to negotiate their fate and future emancipations. For Indians, as
much as for Algerians or Kenyans, the colonised’s national independence,
besides the pains and sacrifices, has been largely decided elsewhere, although
it is disrespectful to presume that battlefields did not matter.
This
gives us an accurate picture of how the French establishment views Algeria
today. Perhaps less so than how Britain views India, France sees Algeria as a
bitch that got tired of sleeping with Paris and decided in a fit of anger to go
to bed with Washington. All other approximations to those relations are meant
to confuse, perhaps justify, never to explain what the French establishment to
this day cannot overcome what it considers as the impossible loss! Now for
Algerians, both the establishment and ordinary people, severance of ties with
France spelt good riddance with an abusive and unjust colonial system. But it
is precisely here where Algerians prefer to overlook the American role and
attribute victory exclusively to their forefathers’ sacrifices. Worse than a
taboo, the refusal to acknowledge the American role spells the bewilderment of
Algerian elites since they are not even aware this pivotal role exists. Perhaps
apart from a handful of core FLN negotiators all perished by now, a few—if
any—realise the U.S. part in Algeria’s independence.
[1] Owen
White, 2021. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of
French Algeria. Harvard University Press. Please refer to my review of the
book. https://www.theleftberlin.com/review-owen-white-the-blood-of-the-colony-wine-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-french-algeria/
[2] “I
have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is
exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which someday
could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend
my mother above justice.” Herbert R. Lottman, Camus, A Biography (1979)
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT29_wJJmvU or
consider this largely forgotten one now “Fransa mellat” by Cheikh
Bouregaa decrying how colonial France treated Algerians as sub-humans as well
as the latter’s fight for their own self-respect during the revolutionary war
1954-1962: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmvUlFr-Aw
[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-would-be-speaking-german-without-us-trump-tells-macron-cw668ssdw#:~:text=The%20US%20president%20told%20Mr,higher%20tariffs%20on%20French%20wine
Shirk,
Mark. 2022. Making War on the World. How Transnational Violence Reshapes Global
Order. Columbia University Press, New York. pp. 256
For Mark Shirk, "the idea that the state is
receding in the face of globalization or that it is no longer as important as
it once was is a straw man." (p. 147) For him, the Westphalian state has
undergone several transformations, and the current global capital attack on the
state is but a convoluted way of registering transformation. In short, Shirk
finds that the state endures. Only that one's understanding of it has to be
broadened and démodé conceptions abandoned.
The gist
of the book is that state and anti-state actors or structures reinforce each
other, all for the benefit of the former. The latter could be early
eighteenth-century pirates, late-nineteenth-century anarchists, or early
twenty-first-century jihadists. In each example, Shirk takes, the state's
initial response is largely inadequate. Eventually, the state learns its lesson
through dynamics, which he calls: shattering and reinscribing. In exhausting
its resources, the state causes some dysfunctionalities, but it gradually
harnesses the courage to defeat the challenge. But the state neutralizes
threats once ingrained habits, those thought useful for bypassing the threat
are challenged. Only new and transboundary practices reinvigorate the state to
the point that the state itself is transformed, almost beyond recognition,
particularly for observers reared on entrenched practices. With each violent
crisis, Shirk illustrates three he deems pivotal. It is not exactly the concept
of the state but rather an outmoded understanding of its nature and role, which
must be left behind. In the end, "boundaries have always been shattered
and reinscribed; change is constant and the state [emerges] as a project, a
process." (p. 146)
In
"Change and Continuity in Political Order", the definition of state
actors has to accommodate what we currently call the private sector since the
latter operates in a state ecosystem. Because threats are transboundary, like
with three examples treated in the issuing three chapters, old theories (such
as geographical sovereignty and state competitions) are bypassed in
understanding the evolution of the concept of statehood in practice. In
conclusion, we read that borders are fluid (defined by surveillance, not by
exclusion), and sovereignty is almost ontological. It comes irrespective of
territory or citizens' acquiescence.
In
"The Golden Age of Piracy and the Creation of an Atlantic World",
readers find that from 1710 to 1730, piracy around the Caribbean Islands and
the costs of what is today the United States constituted a major threat to the
mercantile economy and the chances of European emerging capitalisms for
expansions. Only by relocating judicial power to the periphery (the colonies)
piracy was finally extinguished, and commerce resumed. Britain (not France or
Holland) emerged as the biggest winner, less through design and more by
accident.
In
"'Propaganda of the Deed,' Surveillance and the Labor Movement", we
read that by the end of the nineteenth century, radical socialists or
anarchists called for a stateless order. Their means to achieve such an
objective is the assassination of monarchs, heads of state, and lesser state
representatives. States' repressions followed, but efforts to quell anarchism
only succeeded when state legislators introduced the welfare state and the
eight-hour working day. The state funnelled the anarchists' energy into labour
movements.
In
"Al-Qaeda, the War on Terror, and the Boundaries of the Twenty-First
Century", Shirk observes that following 9/11, the policies the U.S. took,
such as the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, did not pay off. Such responses
were more expressive of anxiety and confusion than judicious countermeasures.
In the following decade, targeted killing by drones and data surveillance
succeeded in illuminating terrorists' threats. Data surveillance, in
particular, has irrecoverably transformed the state in the sense that liberal
democracy that guarantees the individual's (citizen and alien) privacy is
fundamentally challenged.
One
cannot agree more with Shirk's proposal. Topping the three illustrative
scenarios lies perhaps marron communities and Marronage as an anti-state
institution. Those slave escapees who established independent communities at
the top of mountains and other inaccessible localities and challenged empires
could only be destroyed once the technology became available. But what dictates
the transformation of the state is that situation where capital takes over from
the state because it no longer needs a state, at least the one that is
paternalistically understood.
Leaving
the issue of the teleological unfolding of the process of state transformation
to others, I choose to dwell on the book's approach. The practice theory
unveils itself as anti-historical. Instead of universal principles, we read
that "…it is situations that determine the meaning and outcome of the
event." (p. 139) Even when deploying three historical situations, Shirk's
proposition cancels historical destiny, that is, people's aspiration for
freedom from state orders, the way the pirates, the anarchists, or jihadists
dreamed of. So why deny that history has a sense, a universal principle called
emancipation? Shirk's argument can be confused as the trust that there is
neither right nor wrong outside space and time, but it is not. For him, that
which is working (not that which works) has to be right is an ideological
imposition, seeking to eradicate the subaltern's (the wretched of the world)
resolve to challenge the state because the latter is presumed to be too
invincible and as such cannot be successfully challenged.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Bessinger,
Mark. R. (2022) The Revolutionary City: Urbanisation and the Global
Transformation of Rebellion. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.
Mark
Beissinger is a political scientist from Princeton. His latest book, The
Revolutionary City, surveys revolutions from 1904 to 2014. He finds that within
this time framework, revolutions started in the middle of the nineteenth
century in cities. Think of 1848 waves against several European monarchies, and
perhaps the most famous of all—the Paris Commune 1871. Revolutions have been
ruralised, given the state’s capacity for lethally coercive power. Most of
these, Beissinger calls social revolutions: against absolute monarchs or for
regaining independence. But by the end of the twentieth and the beginning of
the twenty-first centuries, revolutions have relocated back to cities. True,
unlike their antecedents, revolutions are now civic (non-violent), understood
as “a mass siege of an established government by its population with the goals
of bringing about regime change...” (p. 3)
The
relocation to the city presupposes the proximity of revolutions to the nerve
centres of state power, a situation that has impacted—even sometimes
dictated—not only the tactics but their scope. Fueled by the power of numbers
or the capacity to mobilise huge crowds more than well-defined ideological
convictions, urban revolutions are revolutions against corrupt and wasteful
elites within the state. This logic of negativity specifies that, unlike social
revolutions, urban revolutions are more likely to lead to less enduring achievements
and legacies. Because they tend to unfold in relatively shorter stretches: over
weeks, when compared with social revolutions, which usually take years,
activists have to build consensuses and forge coalitions. The problem with
coalitions is how they cause urban revolts to fail even when they succeed in
ousting incumbent regimes eventually. It is precisely when they oust their
nemeses that urban revolutions become less likely to survive post-revolutionary
scenarios (upheavals for which they have inherited: marred living conditions
that convinced people to revolt in the first place). Beissinger reminds us that
with social revolutions, coalitions and compromises are significantly less
common, often unthinkable.
Unlike
social revolutions, urban civic revolutions remain, more often than not, unable
to bypass the societal cleavages animating urban revolutionaries and activists.
Such cleavages translate into an inherent inability to stabilise society and
smoothly lead it to meet its aspirations: good services and a functional
economy. Urban civic revolutions are at heart geared toward anti-political
movements, and they display a deep distrust for political elites and
frameworks.
The
Revolutionary City has ten chapters, the conclusion included. The statistical
method builds on data from across the globe and covers the period between 1904
to 2014 with sensible projections beyond these dates. The text comes peppered
with statistical illustrations, charts, and tables; they can be at first
intimidating for readers who are unused to quantitative approaches. But lest
these readers rush to close The Revolutionary City prematurely, it becomes
particularly rewarding to note how numbers and statistics speak the truth and
common sense regarding the uses and abuses of revolutions. The razor-sharp
distinctions save scholars hailing from Marxist and phenomenological
backgrounds from the lyricism regarding what revolutions are and how they
propagate. Besides, the text is followed by four major appendixes for those who
want to check to further the data from the survey experiment Beissinger
conducted. This priceless data may look like heartless commodification of human
lives and legitimate aspirations for better lives to the realm of quantifiable
at the expense of the qualifiable. Readers again should resist the temptation
to disengage from its findings or method because these numbers tellingly
underline human experience. The data is similarly available on the author’s
website.[1]
The first
chapter: ‘A Spatial Theory of Revolution’, underlines how the spatial
relocation of revolution leads to the proximity dilemma. What is solved through
galvanising large crowds and the power of numbers is lost through the critical
need for coalitions. The latter involves ideological dilutions that haunt urban
civic revolutionists once they succeed in ousting the contested power in terms
of murky performances, precipitating upcoming societal upheavals.
The
second chapter, ‘The Growth and Urbanization of Revolution’, specifies an
increasing frequency of revolutionary episodes around the world. He finds that
the massive shift of people from rural places to cities, the consolidation of
states during the Cold War, and the rise of the unipolar world order dictate
the rise of urban revolutions.
In the third
chapter, ‘The Urban Civic Revolutionary Moment’ Beissinger sets the stage for
his probabilistic approach. Instead of presuming causes (falling into biases),
he proposes exploring factors that mark urban civic revolutionary episodes. He
calls these factors ‘structural conditions.’ Because conditions such as
inequality, poverty, and underdevelopment are associated with social
revolutions, Beissinger finds that urban civic revolutions do not correlate
with such conditions. Structural conditions explain the break between the
unfolding of revolutions past and present. Meanwhile, the conditions crystalise
the methodological cost when considering contemporary revolutions as a
continuum of past ones.
Chapter
Four, ‘The Repression-Disruption Trade-off and the Shifting Odds of Success’,
stipulates how the chances of revolutionary success have never ceased of
augmenting thanks to urbanisation and proximity to power centres. This does not
mean that with each revolutionary scenario, the task of unseating regimes is more
frequent and predictable than failures.
As
outlined in the fifth chapter ‘Revolutionary Contingency and the City’” it is
challenging for both incumbent regimes and their contestants to steer the next
move and respond to rapidly unfolding updates. Mistakes or missteps from either
party become acutely magnified, with direct and often irreversible
consequences. This is the impact of what Beissinger brilliantly underlines as
‘thickened history.’ Mistakes, even outright blunders, used to be contained and
remediable with social revolutions, which is never the case with urban
revolutions.
The sixth
chapter, ‘Public Space and Urban Revolution’, reiterates the far-reaching
impacts of the unfolding of revolutionary work in cities and capitals. Cities
like Paris were initially rebuilt to facilitate the quelling of revolts and
popular movements. Beissinger, in this chapter, finds that the physical
location and the symbolic value in the design of cities can be redefined to
serve urban revolutions.
Beissinger,
in the seventh chapter, ‘The Individual and Collective Action in Urban Civic
Revolution,’ finds participants widely diverse. That explains the fundamental
disagreements once the contested regimes fall and revolutionaries assume the
steering wheels of the state apparatus. Limitations in leading smooth
post-revolutionary scenarios underline how, irrespective of massively
circulating narratives and “judging from motivations mentioned by participants
themselves, these were revolutions not for democracy, but against the corrupt
and abusive rule.” (p. 304)
Chapter
eight, ‘The Pacification of Revolution’, finds that the data from the past
century indicates that even with the ever-increasing number of revolutions,
revolutionary situations have become significantly less lethal. Urbanisation
ranks among the top causes of the decline of lethality. The decline should not
lead us to assume that seating powers have grown ethical. Rather, regimes are
mortally worried about the backlash from deploying pacification forces to
control unruly or seditious crowds.
‘The
Evolving Impact of Revolution’ or chapter nine, contrasts the achievements of
social revolutions against those of urban civic ones. Testable achievements are
scaled down to five: political order, economic growth, inequality, political
freedom, and government accountability. Orders emerging from urban civic
revolutions last less in power than their counterparts from social revolutions.
Even when they introduce a substantial increase in political freedom, urban
civic revolutions fail to deliver on economic growth or fight inequality. These
shortcomings—Beissinger finds—are never the fault of urban revolutions. The
latter inherited the state with its embedded networks of corruption and
nepotism.
The last
chapter, ‘The City and the Future of Revolution,’ concludes its historical
perspectives by predicting that revolutions, as they have substantially changed
in style and delivery during the last three centuries, will continue evolving.
The internet already displays new mobilisation techniques and
counterrevolutionary and surveillance potentials. In a nutshell, there is no
end to the possibilities for revolutionary regime change.
Sometimes
Beissinger’s designed abstention from qualification as with ‘coupvolution’
defined as “a mass siege of government aimed at regime-change that precipitates
a military coup” (p. 29) sacrifices complexity for the smooth unfolding of a
theory, for there are situations where revolutions and counterrevolutions are
so close to each other and unfold in a confusing attire. Likewise, Beissinger’s
approach, built on la coupure or rupture between social revolutions and urban
civic revolutions, can be deployed by counterrevolutionaries to rationalise
historical discontinuity, that is, to discourage people from looking at
historical antecedents to carry out unfinished emancipations.
These two
remarks aside, policymakers and democracy activists will find the book
particularly rewarding. Busy readers may limit their engagement to the
introduction since Beissinger has squeezed the gist of his book in a nicely
accurate synthesis there. Even counterrevolutionaries will benefit from The
Revolutionary City. Quite an irony but true! Indeed, the quantitative method
convincingly explains why certain post-revolutionary situations such as
Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya are stuck in loopholes. Beissinger’s method leaves no
space for self-flagellation (a path taken by several activists and
pseudo-historians). Again, the method enables readers to register that every
eventuality subscribes to the Hegelian logic of necessity where all that exists
could not have existed. The Syrian nightmare remains the exception that proves
Beissinger’s case: the more time it takes to defeat the incumbent and the
bloodiest the struggle, the more enduring will be the fruits for the
proletariat.
________________________________________
[1]
Please check it at: https://scholar.princeton.edu/mbeissinger/software--
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Two
Book Reviews On The Muslim Brotherhood- by Fouad Mami
Victor,
J. Willi, 2021. The Fourth Ordeal: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
1968-2018. Cambridge University Press. Hardcover: $90.76; Paperback: $30.45;
ISBN-10: 1108822452; ISBN-13: 978-1108822459;
pp. 588.
Lorenzo Vidino, 2020. The Closed Circle: Joining and Leaving the Brotherhood in
the West. Columbia University Press. Hardcover: $80.51; Paperback: $30.00;
ISBN-10: 023119367X; ISBN-13: 978-0231193672;
pp. 296.
Can one
emancipate with a structure that is largely non-emancipatory? And what is the
exact role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the context of the massive
insurrections known as the Arab Spring? Several observers underline a situation
where the revolution has been present, whereas the revolutionaries have been
largely missing (Bayet 2017, Traboulsi 2014). Others note that both the
revolutionaries and the revolution have been active, but the reversal of the
Brotherhood's fortunes indicates a cycle wherein the counterrevolution has
gained the upper hand and that ascendency has not spared the Brotherhood, even
when the latter has always "avoid[ed] revolutions and revolutionary change
[as they are thought to] lead to unexpected consequences." (al-Anani 2022,
2) Still, the predomination of the counterrevolution does not in any sensible
way guarantee that history will work in favour of the counterrevolution
indefinitely. Much has been at play, and the following review essay accelerates
the magisterial findings in both books to go beyond what each one highlights.
To begin
with, Willi's The Fourth Ordeal presumes that the demise of the Brotherhood—its
fall from grace—in the coup of July 2013 is a tactical error. Differently put,
had the proponents of the Society's fourth Guide (el-Tilmsani) prevailed, the
Qutbists (a vanguard subgroup within the Society that follows the ideology put
forth by the radical jihadist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966)) would have little chance
in fragmenting the Brotherhood both just before the surge of the Arab Spring
and after the group's victory in the presidential elections in June 2012. In
what follows, I will show that rapid ascendency, while plausible, remains
untenable in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, the demise of
the Society could not have been avoided regardless of which competing wing
within it had been in control. The demise of July 3rd, 2013 and the subsequent
fragmentation had not been a tactical miscalculation. And rather, it has been
the undistorted translation of the motoring principle within the soon-to-be a
century-old movement.
My
contention presupposes an unbridgeable methodological divide between strategies
of and for reform and those of revolt. Since Egypt was caught amid a radically
incendiary situation, the means and the mindset of reform subscribe more to the
prerequisites of the counterrevolutionary moment and its demands. This is
different from ascertaining that the Brotherhood is categorically (as a matter
of principle) a regressive or restorative force like, say, the military.
Rather, it is the Society's pseudo-revolutionary dynamic, its political
duplicity that borders on naivety, which is another facet of its theoretical
poverty and distrust of radical youth forces that dictated its vulnerability to
counterrevolutionary forces. The combination of all these shortcomings has
dictated its fourth ordeal.
This
review essay pleads for a radical distinction between the social means of a
revolution, seeking a rupture with the manners of the past, and those tools
aiming at reform, stressing gradualism and long-term change. Once this
distinction serving a methodological axiom is set, the Brotherhood's
performance in the revolutionary situation put forth by the post-2011 situation
cannot be mistaken. This distinction also serves in reading Vidino's The Closed
Circle as it zooms in on what he chooses to study: the Brotherhood's
international branch, meaning: the Brotherhood's affiliates in Western Europe
and the U.S. Perhaps to no one's surprise, both the original/Egyptian
Brotherhood and its structure in the West (Western Europe and North America)
are reformist. And unlike Willi, Vidino seizes on the logical implications when
opting for a reformist track, taking part in the political game and hence the
reverse of fortunes coming with the impasse of its project in both Egypt,
Tunisia as well as in France, Denmark, Sweden, the U.K. and, certainly, the
U.S.
Both
Willi and Vidino, from the start, embraced the method of oral history: conducting
not a small number of interviews with rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood
and certain leadership figures and dissenters both in Egypt and abroad. This
method the authors contrast with the approach that reads the Brotherhood as a
social movement. The advantages they advance are multiple. For interviews-based
approach facilitates seeing the movement less like a solid structure and more
as a social actor in the real world, combined with a heterogeneous pool of
opinions across the movement's hierarchal spectrum. In contrast with Vidino,
the interviews Willi conducts are massive, and so are his readings of memoirs,
brochures, and news updates on blogs and websites. Still, both authors' command
of Arabic boosts their grasp on the thematic they engage with. The result shows
in a plethora of details that corroborate their thesis rooted—unfortunately in
Willi's case more than Vidino's—more in speculation than in a solid historical
reading of these facts they amassed.
In
Chapter I: "The Society of the Muslim Brothers", Willi stresses that
the niche for his study lies in the lack of serious, reliable, and unbiased
literature addressing the Brotherhood. Most of what exists is produced by
attention-grabbing pseudo-scholars and think-tanks. Against a background rampant
with simplistic studies and severely lacking in written archives, Victor's
project of doing oral history explains the importance of spelling out the
details of the "great saga" (12). He does this by zooming in on
al-Banna's project of reviving the faith within a colonial context in which
Egypt was a British protectorate. Contextualization is vital in beating up
cliches. Willi then considers Banna's precursors in the political revival of
Islam: Mohammed' Abduh, Jamal din Afghani and Mohammed Rachid Rida. The book
does not overlook the Sufi elements in the Banna's vision serving as a 'pure'
fountain for the reactivation of the faith in the sociopolitical order of the
1920s and 1930s. Later, the reader encounters al-Banna's organizational
seven-step blueprint and the basic literature of the movement. He ends the
chapter by reassuring Western audiences that al-Banna's idea of the caliphate
is more of a metaphor, "a catchphrase" (33) for founding a Muslim
parallel to the European Union or the United States of America.
Chapter
II: "The Second Founding (1968-1981)" invokes the post-1954
incarceration of the Brotherhood's leadership under President Nacer. The latter
almost cancelled the Society from existence. However, in the wake of the Arab
defeat of 1967 in the war with Israel and the Student Protests of 1968, the
leaders of the Brotherhood were freed from prisons and connived into Egyptian
social life. But it was until President Sadaat's tenure that Brotherhood
members were grudgingly tolerated a political role. 'Omar al-Tilmsani became
the third Guide officially in 1973 and it was his gradualist approach as
specified in his book, Preachers, Not Judges (1969), resonated with President
Sadaat's policy of appeasement on two levels. The first comes in the context of
a rival group, Jama'at al-Muslimin (Society for Muslims). The latter aligns
itself with a radical jihadi ideology as outlined by Sayyid Qutb, which was
then on the rise and threatened to destabilize the country. The second, which
is no less important but overlooked by Willi, is the prominence of socialist
and communist parties, exerting pressure on the powers of the time. Thus,
al-Tilmsani's rendition of the Brotherhood and his balanced approach served
Sadaat's policy of personalist rule. Sadaat's rapprochement with Tel Aviv and
his eventual assassination in 1981 dictated that this arrangement with the
state becomes now lacking.
Chapter
II: "The Rise of the Vanguard (1981-1991)" refers to how
al-Tilmisani's adherents (proponents of gradualism in dealing with the powers
that be as well as in the decision-making structure inside the Brotherhood)
started losing currency to the more radical elements. Instead, it is now the
vanguardist approach, those followers of Sayyid Qutb's ideology as specified in
the latter book, Signposts on the Road (1964), who are gaining momentum. Other
than the takfiri and jihadi articles of faith, the vanguardists trust in the
Qutb's philosophy of jahiliyyah or modern-day structural ignorance whose raison
d’être explains Society's need for the vanguards, those people "who engage
with society while practising mental and emotional withdrawal from it."
(107) With the vanguards in charge, the Brotherhood expanded both nationally
(to all governorates in Egypt) and internationally (literally, worldwide).
Meanwhile, it expanded into all professional syndicates and won an important
number of seats in parliament.
Of
capital interest in understanding the fourth ordeal of the Brotherhood is the
section titled: "The Brotherhood's Neoliberal Turn" in Chapter IV:
"Brotherhood Incorporated (1991-2001)." The section traces the rise
of the business-minded cadre in the Guidance Office, the likes of Khairat
al-Shamir, who, while a vanguardist and jihadist, is similarly a business
tycoon and strategist. The rise of al-Shamir and his cliques, Willi outlines,
echoes the Brotherhood's overall change of perspective where "Quranic ideals
with newly acquired market economy concepts…the emerging Islamic discourse
embraced the modern business corporation as a model through which one could
articulate specifically Islamic policies and objectives." (157) A
subsequent section bearing on the consequence of the seismic turn marks the
"Transformation of the Social Base" within the several-decades long
Brotherhood, ending in a quasi-class struggle within the movement. Therefore,
the decade preceding 9/11 not only witnessed the break up between various
Brotherhood national Chapters over the first Gulf War but a rupture with
classical Brotherhood formation in Egypt itself.
Chapter
V: "Struggle for Leadership (2001-2011)" carefully reads the decade
spanning the period between 9/11 and the kick-off of the Arab Spring as it
marked a further split between the gradualists and vanguardists groups within
the Brotherhood. The denialist narrative of 9/11 by people introducing
themselves as members of the Society complicated the relationship with the U.S.,
given how neoconservative orientalists branded political Islam. The Guidance
Office started a public relations campaign denying allegations of its alleged
static disposition and succeeded in establishing a rapprochement with the U.S.
administration. On the eve of the January 25th Revolt, Willi specifies that the
Brotherhood spearheaded by the vanguards was never in its best shape. The
author lists several strategically fatal decisions paving the way for its
fourth ordeal.
Chapter
VI: "Revolution, Rise, and Fall (2011-2013)" enumerates several
strategic miscalculations that resulted in the fourth ordeal of the
Brotherhood. Chief among those several miscalculations, in Willi's opinion, is
the inability of the Vanguard group to register the steam and the scale of the
real and unexpected change that the revolutionary situation of post-January
25th has made possible. Victor notes a mental lag between the old school
activism that marked the leadership on the one hand and the Brotherhood's youth
revolutionary zeal and ardour. Against the specific warnings of the
Brotherhood's youth, the leadership harried toward a hasty and farfetched
alliance with the Egyptian military, expecting to be rewarded for its
allegiance with power (al-Aswany 2021). The fiasco illustrates not only how
(contrary to its youth) the negotiating cadres of the Brotherhood showed a lack
of imagination but deep-seated duplicity, as shown in incidents such as the
Maspero and the Blue-Bra Girl. The race for power for its own sake sealed the
Brotherhood's unfortunate fate.
Chapter
VII: "The Beginning of the Fourth Ordeal (2013-2018)" starts with how
General Sissi's cracked up on the Brotherhood sit-ins in both Rab'a and
al-Nahda Squares in August 2013 instead of uniting the remaining leaders, those
who managed to escape or go underground in time, had fragmented them further.
The crack-up, Willi finds out, has been unprecedented in intensity since
Nassers' times in the 1950s and 1960s. Naturally, the second rank leadership
had its chance in steering the Brotherhood. But the vanguard group, both from
prison and exile, refused to secede important prerogatives, resulting in a
feud, which, whether motivated by ego or by ideology, Willi does not specify.
However, he specifies that a non-negligible section in the Egyptian leadership
of the Brotherhood has propagated towards the necessity of the revolutionary
path, including the armed struggle against General Sissi's dictatorship. But
with the execution of Mohammed Kamel in October 2016, the revolutionary path lost
currency. Rivalry and division remain, however, endemic, marking the
Brotherhood to this day (the first half of 2022) even when the book closed its
study in 2018.
Even if
Vidino's The Closed Circle approaches the Western chapters of the Muslim
Brotherhood, it does not substantially differ from Willi's monumental gathering
of facts and analysis. Eternalization of politics and duplicity in using it or
the unprincipled deployment of religion rank supreme among Vidino's critique of
the Western Brotherhood. The seven testimonial chapters are sandwiched between
two introductory chapters varying between definitions and hypothesizing and two
concluding ones as they synthesize the findings and read those findings beyond
the amassed evidence. Hence, concerning Vidino's volume, I am saving the
readers the middle chapters because all the seven testimonies (in the seven
middle chapters) are squeezed into the synthesized findings and the
methodological readings that go beyond the evidence.
Chapter
I, "What is the Muslim Brotherhood in the West?" starts with a
methodological note regarding the sea of confusion in identifying Brotherhood
organizations in the West. The reasons are multiple, but chief among which is
the stigma the name recalls, given the 9/11 attacks and the steeped Orientalist
portrayals that often present the movement outside space and time. Therefore,
policymakers in the West are indeed in the dark, and Vidino's volume sells its
credentials to facilitate practical ways of dealing with not a small number of
Brotherhood offshoots in the West. While invariably sharing the belief that
Islam is complete in and for itself, the Brotherhood groups do not seek to
Islamize Western societies, aiming to facilitate the integration of Muslim
immigrants into these societies. Vidino identifies three major categories of
Brotherhood organizations. He counts a- pure Brotherhood bodies, which prefer
non-public or secretive networking; b- Brotherhood spawns where affiliated
members maintain an emotional link with the original organization but are not
structurally tied to it; c- there are those groups who are only distantly
influenced. All the three varieties have a vested interest in being
representative of Muslim communities and collaborating with governments bodies
in a way that channels partnerships over funds and political capital in the
countries where they are based.
Vidino
outlines in Chapter II: "Joining and Leaving the Brotherhood" the
criteria for selection of members and subsequently the reasons for these
recruits' disillusionment which are inducive for parting ways with the
movement. As to joining, the Brotherhood selects its cadres, not the other way
around. No application in the classical sense is reported. The selection
criteria have to do more on signs that promise piousness and obedience. Now,
concerning leaving the movement, Vidino zooms in on two principal reasons. The
first is disenchantment with the leadership and or dissatisfaction with the
inner workings of the Society. The second specifies the group's ideology,
particularly the Brotherhood's gradualist approach and its political duplicity.
At the end of the chapter, Vidino broaches upon the dissenters' own life after
leaving the Brotherhood, often reported as tough as the former members had had
little, if at all, social life outside the movement.
All the
seven chapters from the III to the IX examine those moments of recruitment in
detail. They contextualize both the joining and the leaving and provide reasons
for each. The format used is a testimony that the author recomposes from
face-to-face interviews and email correspondence. The common thread is the
appeal or radiance that the Brotherhood holds, the enchantment of the early
days and months, even years, and the expectations of serving in a larger-than-life
cause in a movement whose name inspires owe and pride. No less common is the
stifled dissatisfactions stamping the secretive nature of the Society's inner
working, which the dissenters find no solid reason for maintaining except
perhaps due to greed for power and manipulation of the lower and mid-ranking
brothers. Most of the common testimonies Vidino brings note how the penchant
for secrets could be quite an in place when working under or dealing with
autocratic governments such as Egypt, Jordon, or Syria but certainly out of
context when operating in Western democracies. Likewise, the testimonies note
that leading Brothers, those involved with the real decision-making, rarely
bother to read the languages of the Western societies they live in, say little
as to genuine attempts at understanding these societies' histories and complex
dynamics.
Chapter
X: "Joining and Leaving: What the Evidence Suggests" underlines a
methodology in reading the problem of dissenting from the Brotherhood. Most
dissenters left because they thought "current leaders have strayed from
Hassan al-Banna's original message." (179). Others raised the concern of
secrecy and doublespeak in the proceedings, which is thought to serve only
"a small nomenklatura of interconnected activists, an aristocratic
elite." (179) Differently put, ideological convictions are hardly the
reason. Only a tiny minority of the dissenters (Ahmed Akkari, Mohamed Louizi,
and the American Brothers) zoom in on the motoring principle behind the various
chapters of the Western Brotherhood and find it problematic. They list the
leaders' duplicity in playing politics with the powers that be. The face-saving
infuriation concerning the Danish cartoons that featured Prophet Muhammed from
2003 to 2007 reveals how the key leaders can go in trading with their
presumably principled defence of the faith. Other less fatal problems are
listed in the chapter.
The last
chapter: "The Western Brotherhood's Future: From the Arab Spring and
Beyond." The video draws the picture of the Western Brotherhood
transitioning toward post-Islamism. Contrary to Western governments' lack of
policy, Saudia Arabia and UAE cracked up on their local chapters and tagged the
principal Brotherhood in Egypt (following the July 2013 coup) with its Western
wing, a terrorist organization stipulating a major geostrategic turn. Adding
salt to injury, as soon as the Arab Spring started, Western Brothers joined
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and other places (their countries of origin) to assume
leading positions there. Still, they left their former positions in the West
empty. For converts and those Muslim staying behind in the West, that move,
like Ghannouchi's, dealt a serious blow to the image of the Western Brothers,
pilling evidence of the opportunism of these leaders and the uncertain future
of the Western Brotherhood as a whole. Vidino suggests that the scene is
perhaps ready for post-Ikhawanism, like post-communism during the 1970s and the
1980s.
The
extensive details about the extremely divergent pool of opinions between the
Brotherhood's inner circle, the small group of decision-makers, and their
contestants, as well as the dissatisfactions, even the dissenting voices of
second rank leaders in the provinces, as brilliantly displayed in Willi's
study, however, are never a waste of time for the perceptive reader. Such
details specify that Willi has actually spelt everything except the essential,
or perhaps he has gradually broached upon that essential. For if they amount to
anything, these extensive details remain food for thought because they confirm
how a structure or movement founded for reform cannot by any stretch of the
imagination propagate towards reform's antithesis: revolution. Such a situation
does not result because of the overblown narcissistic drives of certain leaders
or the fact that an ageing leadership in the Guidance Office was cut off from
rapidly evolving reality, the way Will tries to convince us.
With a
rapidly evolving revolutionary situation or overblown egos, leaders'
out-of-touch are solid empirical factors. However, as the historical experience
of the long durée shows, they remain marginal because each of Willi's listed
factors enjoys no autonomous scenario of its own. The fact that the radical
Qutbists won over the al-Telemsani-influenced members of the Shura council or
became dominant in the Guidance Office does not alter the situation that the
Brotherhood remains marred in theoretical poverty as literally not a single
figure among its presumed thinkers dares to question the bedrock of the world's
political economy. The Brotherhood's early bidder for the presidency before
Morsi was Khairat el-Shatir, a proponent of the Qutbist ultra-conservative
approach but equally an ambitious business conglomerate with literally billions
of dollars. As his asset! The contradiction in combining piety and worldly
success in a world deemed by Qutbists corrupt to the marrow is worthy of a
study all on its own. That study can explain how the Brotherhood has had no
qualms over sending emissaries to Washington DC and freely giving assurances
concerning Israel's future security. Not a small number of observers mistake
this Brotherhood's maneuverer as realpolitik. It offers a death blow to
ordinary Egyptians' expectations for a substantial rupture from Mubarak's era.
This is an example of Willi's impressive display of facts minutely scanned but
are not pressed enough to yield and distil a solid historical reading
showcasing that reform cannot befriend and accommodate revolt, in the sense
that it cannot meet the people's minimum expectations in the wake of ousting an
enduring dictator such as Hosni Mubarek.
The
Brotherhood's appeal to the U.S. establishment specifies two issues, not one.
Apart from showcasing the leadership's lust for political power (al-Anani 2022,
10), its readiness to play with the available-but-abusive so-called 'rules of
the game' indicates the extent to which the movement suffers from a severe
theoretical confusion. The stipulation of the theoretical clarity stands at
odds with Willi's broodings over tactical issues such as the Brotherhood's
decades of incarceration and overall underground work carried out as an
opposition entity made the movement apathetic to, not just, unready to assume
political rule. All these are true but theoretical muddiness made the
Brotherhood it is own worst enemy because that muddiness renders it incapable
of embracing its historical responsibility. Indeed, the shallowness of its
theoretical foundation largely decides its incapacity of spotting an alternative
to the post-1945 American order. The combination of putting people of the like
of al-Shatir's calibre in key positions in the movement illustrates that they
take the laws of the market economy for granted. Similarly, their unconditional
readiness to compromise on matters both delicate and of principle, such as the
Palestinian Question, confirms those readings which trust in the Brotherhood as
a radical alternative to Mubarek's corrupt ways are not only slightly mistaken
but fundamentally false.
Suffice
it to note that ever since its inception in 1928, the Society has never
introduced itself except as a fundamentally reformist movement. Why pity the
Brotherhood against reformism, the reader legitimately asks? The short answer
is that Islam is either revolutionary or it is not. In this context, it is
worth noting that Prophet Muhammad did not rub shoulders with the Meccan
capitalists of his own time, not because he was not capable or that the
opportunity did not present itself. For historical accuracy, the Meccan lords
pleaded with him to preside over them. And it is he who did not accept because
he knew he would be serving their caravans and businesses, and he was looking
for a world without caravans and businesses. In the case of the Brotherhood, as
Willi's succinct study brilliantly shows but rarely seizes on the fact that the
Brotherhood had never been missing committed activists with exceptional talents
and organizational skills. Therefore, to blame one faction or pity one subgroup
against another is to participate in confusing, not elucidating, Egypt's
revolutionary/counterrevolutionary situation.
Vidino's
synthesis from the interviews and email exchanges puts its hand directly on the
spot where it hurts the Western Brothers the most, that is, on the future of
the movement as a whole. I learned how the multicultural Society envisioned by
Western Brotherhood is exactly the opposite of what Western governments have in
mind or plan for their nations. Pierre Durrani and Mohamed Louizi's testimonies
both note how the Brotherhood flouted multiculturalism to maintain its parallel
societies or ghettos: anti-universal Muslims communicating with like-minded
Muslims and cheating the hospitality extended by Western societies. For
anti-universal Muslims nurse the illusion that they can conquer Rome from
within one day. Rome here is that mythical Western capital in the prophetic
tradition. Despite Vidino being bemoaning how Western governments lack a
long-term and consistent approach to the Society, this very duplicity in bending
laws and abusing multiculturalism could be behind the U.S. policy planners'
decision to let Morsi and his government down. Likely, U.S. planners did not
want another heart-breaking Islamic republic, à la Iran. And in cutting the
head of the mother movement in Egypt, its Western offshoots will be
automatically powerless. In this context, we can read the ongoing feuds between
Brotherhood leaders inside and outside Egypt, Ghannouchi's statement in favour
of post-Islamism, and the assassination of Mohamed Kamel, rendering the
Brotherhood's revolutionary bid into nought.
The
powerful point of the two books is how they allow Brotherhood members to speak
and allow several voices and insiders' informed opinions to sketch the
readers', not necessarily the authors', final analysis. The fact that the two
authors speak and read Arabic, along with other languages, is an asset and
facilitates their intentions to translate their humility and patience (unlike
attention-grabbing Orientalists carrying out pseudo-scholarly works) to learn
from the materials and synthesize their learning in these two books. The two
authors are likely to transform how Islamist movements are approached and
understood through such studies. Willi's study, in particular, highlights the
role of functional social movements (in a similar vein to functional states) as
the American establishment does not want to divulge the Brotherhood from a
functional role, namely: quelling genuine revolutionary movements or those that
can propagate toward upsetting the post-1945 world order. In The Fourth Ordeal,
readers find that "U.S. strategic planners used an active and conscious
policy of mobilizing political Islam to crush ideologies unfavourable to U.S.
interests." (117). Unfortunately, Willi overlooks this methodological
thread where he has failed in his critical observation, for the Brotherhood was
specifically founded to suppress the nationalistic aspirations that emerged in
1920 (Soueif 1999, 224).
Speaking
of the number of ordeals and given the reformist agenda of the Brotherhood or,
more precisely, its lust for power, it is unlikely that the Brotherhood will
cease playing with fire from which it bitterly tasted four times so far. Other
ordeals will follow suit because, at the moment of composing these lines,
reliable news reports circulate that the Brotherhood has been repeatedly
involved in direct talks with representatives of General Sissi's government,
the very person who caused the Brotherhood's demise. The fact that the
Brotherhood is even willing to sit and consider proposals by Sissi's
representatives is evidence of its political naivety. Many will rebut that
aspiration to play a role in the future of their country. The number of
ordeals, and the vocabulary itself, as the word mihnā or ordeal in Arabic
stipulates a momentary but also necessary hardship from which a positive
situation will eventually follow, expresses a willingness to impersonate the
naïveté of an idiot and cancel ordinary Egyptians' historical
destiny.
References:
Al-Anani,
Khalil. Ed. 2021. Islamism and Revolution Across the Middle East:
Transformation of Ideology and Strategy after the Arab Spring. I.B. Tauris.
Al-Aswany,
Alaa. 2021. The Republic of False Truths: A Novel. Knopf: New York and London.
Trans. S. R. Fellowes
Bayat,
Asef. 2021. Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring. Harvard
University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.
Bayat,
Asef. 2017. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab
Spring. Stanford University Press.
Soueif,
Ahdaf. 1999. The Map of Love. Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New York.
Traboulsi,
Fawwaz, 2014. thāwārt bilā thouwār. (Revolutions without Revolutionaries) Dar
Riad al-Rais for Publication and Distribution, Beirut, Lebanon
ISBN-139789953215723
A
Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa. By: Beinin,
Joel. Haddad, Bassam and Seikaly, Sherene. Eds. 2021. Stanford University
Press. Stanford, California. 2021; pp. 344; Paperback: $28.00. ISBN-10:
1503614476; ISBN-13: 978-1503614475
Joel
Beini et al.’s volume is premised on the idea that ‘Rentier State Theory’ (RST)
can no longer serve as an explanatory principle in analyzing state dynamics in
the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The editors presuppose that only a
methodology rooted in critical political economy can explain the fortunes of
MENA peoples in their respective polities.
Class
used to be swept under the carpet, but not anymore in this volume. A
Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa prides
its credentials on reversing the trend put in place by RST. Given the
neoliberal domineering order, marshaling the courage to discuss class is
certainly an added value. Nevertheless, what is troublesome is the rejection of
causality in this volume. The editors follow Louis Althusser’s structuralist
approach where “…causes are simultaneous effects; all events are situated in a
relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestations. (p. 1)
The flattening of causes by equating them with effects and presupposing both as
free-roaming enunciations explain the revival of classless for tracing classes’
role in deciding the destinies for emancipation and more towards stultifying
the dynamics of social change.
The
editors claim that developmentalism is a colonial and postcolonial paradigm par
excellence. Developmentalism has been responsible for the reintegration of
precapitalistic modes of production into global capitalism. The contributors
show that indeed, postcolonial regimes share with their respective colonial
antecedents more than the former are willing to admit. Applying units of
measurements such as GPDs not only hides how measurements remain littered with
ideological biases but that the sophistry of numbers can replace analysis. The
oversight paves the way for what the editors seize as “the triumphalist account
of the European Miracle” (p. 10) which is nothing but an ideological imposition
of the imperial modes of production. Developmentalism sells the illusion that
peoples of the MENA region may one day become the replica of Europe.
The book
is divided into two uneven parts: Part I: “Categories of Analysis” has four
chapters. Kristen Alff in Chapter One illustrates how diverse practices of land
tenure under the Ottomans, and contrary to Orientalist allegations, have never
been a hindrance to capital accumulation. Mercantile activities have been
predominant in the region but the wide-ranging practices of Middle East elites
have not been capitalistically-driven. The imperialists who came by the end of the
nineteenth century and all through World War II coerced Egyptians and peoples
of the Levant into capitalism (p. 26). But according to Alff, the imperialists
simply pressed through various Oriental regimes such as the corvée system
that was already there to enforce capitalism. The only violence that capitalism
introduces in the Middle East, Alff finds, is the commodification of labor (p.
42).
Max Ajil,
Bassam Haddad and Zeinab Abul-Magd in Chapter Two trace the fortunes of
developmentalism in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria. The 1967 defeat before Israel
brought a coup de grace for Egypt and Syria’s developmental
projects. But the coup de grace implies that subterranean
forces, varying between class antagonism and cold war politics (stretching to
the developmental policy of careless borrowings of Muhammad Ali’s successors, a
century before) had been at work. Again, it is large-scale debts that were
meant to fund development that decided the fate of Arab Socialism in Egypt and
Syria. (p. 61) While Egypt succumbed immediately to the infitah policy,
Syria resisted but not without a considerable cost to the material well-being
of its population. Tunisia’s nationalist movement was only pitted against
European settlers’ supremacy. The moment that supremacy was reversed, President
Lahbib Bourguiba was happy with just replacing, not undoing, the colonial
system (p. 51). The contributors explain the persistent infightings in Syria
today on the ground that “…the war simply is too lucrative to dissolve.” (p.
67).
Chapter
Three by Timothy Mitchell dispels roaming myths regarding the role of oil both
in the MENA region and the world at large. Oil supply—readers find—is governed
by conglomerates whose concern is not ensuring the supply of hydrocarbons but
rather the control of production and circulation for the sake of cashing in
monumental profits. Once ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron become the
principal players in the market, their efforts are geared toward the
orchestration of scarcity: maintaining the illusory combination of risk and
rarity whereby “…earnings stretch far into the future” (p. 73). No less
consequential is Mitchell’s observation that, unlike coal which helped to
create mass democracies, oil accelerates regressions towards inegalitarian
polities. Labor has not challenged oil conglomerates, only nation-states have.
The unfortunate side of this equation is that these states become resistant to
coups (p. 77). Perhaps it is better to underline how MENA states have become
resistant to democratic change since by exempting populations from taxation,
governments could elide the maxim of no taxation without representation. Again,
RST is found to be reductive because states benefiting from oil revenues have
integrated the newly generated wealth into other business ventures and created
independent assets, spelling rapid growth.
Shana
Marshall in Chapter Four finds that the endurance of say, Egyptian, Syrian or
Algerian militaries in power despite popular contestations can be explained
through the latter’s congruent connections with the global military-industrial
complex. Such regional militaries are not simple to state functionaries but
form a powerful class whose interests explain the need for a powerful
metropolitan class for growth through expanding arms sales. In recycling oil
money in Western economies, the MENA militaries become indispensable, even,
invincible for the world order as it is, making a radical change exceptionally
challenging. Suffice it to know that “[m]ajor arms exporters and their host
governments were often at the forefront of efforts to pressure the
international financial institutions to rescind demands for sharp reductions in
defense spending.” (p. 91)
Part II:
Country/Regional Studies: comprises seven chapters of which I am zooming only
on two as they best illustrate the editors’ stance vis-à-vis class.
Adam Hanieh’s fifth chapter rejects Hossein Mahdavy’s RST whereby
Gulf governments have been classically approached. Hanieh posits that state and
class are phenomenologically interlinked. Therefore, reliance on oil may have
initially served, even fueled, consumptive habits but in the long run, it has
facilitated the diversification of Gulf economies, creating a wealth-generating
class, not crooked elites. This position contradicts standard accounts of the
Gulf. Meanwhile, Hanieh never undermines these economies’ heavy reliance on
non-citizens as this labor regime can be fatal.
Chapter
Eight by Muriam Haleh Davis follows Jacques Marseille’s presupposition that
starting from 1930 onward France was overburdened by her colonies, and that the
idea of metropolitan France enriching itself from the colonies is but a myth.
Davis posits that no rupture exists when moving from colonial to postcolonial
modes of production (p. 164). What can be considered as a rupture is between
pre-colonial and colonial modes of production in which the appropriation of
tribal lands not only explains the proletarianization of large sways of the
Algerian population but the foundation of a system that systematically worked
against the historical owners of the land.
Indeed,
the importance of class is not news. Nevertheless, the book stays fixated on
one class: a single-player; the one that is holding power at this point.
Nowhere do readers see the strife that usually accompanies competing classes, a
situation that leaves the same readers wondering if editors consider lesser
classes unworthy of attention or whether attempts to alter the present
configuration of classes in the region are simply naïve and wasteful. Such a
stance explains a static account of class; an account divorced from regimes of
land tenure, oil production and circulation, arms dealerships, state control,
and the challenges facing labor. The integration of class in understanding the
tapestry making the MENA political economy is not there yet. Various
contributors, including the last one, zoom in on the role that the lesser
classes or the subaltern may play in reshaping the political economy, but
overall, the contributors treat the subaltern as an immobile category: only the
imperialists, the capitalists are rendered as agents of history.
Regarding
the rising fortunes of capital in the Gulf, it remains a mystery how the
emergence of the capitalistic class which the contributors claim to be
independent of rent has neither flattened the state’s capacity for coercion nor
forced it toward democratization. Such a state of affairs leaves interested
audiences wondering how could such feudal monarchies maintain their grip on
power if indeed there exists a solid capitalistic class, as Hanieh advances.
Indeed, the crash of the real-estate sector in 2009 offers a reflective insight
into how privately owned businesses could be after all a bubble as they cannot
survive without state patronage because they are concentrated in non-productive
sectors. The thesis of the state playing the role of “a midwife of capitalistic
class formation …” (p.121) cannot stand up to scrutiny. Similarly, Chapter
Eight makes it look that Algeria’s independence was a charity from the
capitalists. This is no different from squeezing facts to meet a theory. All
these untenable conclusions result from confusing causes with effects.
While the
book traces a progressivist line from Orientalism and modernization theories,
the overall approach is non-emancipatory as it is geared toward justifying the
triumphant status quo, the one that emerged after the 2011 popular uprisings.
With this conservative outlook, it becomes unsurprising to find the three
contributors of Chapter Two concluding that these uprisings subscribe to
classical bourgeois revolutions (p. 66). They do, but only when flattening
cause and effect, that is, when refusing to register that the uprisings
initially started as incendiary but the revolutionary momentum was crushed in
consequence of the counterrevolution coercive policies, the least of which has
been physical violence. Thus, the book’s approach is geared towards confusing,
not explaining what indeed took place. This underlines the extent to which a
triumphant regime of political economy pretends to provide a critique by simply
promoting capital’s counterrevolutionary moment.
Fouad Mami
Université d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
Sneed, A.
Roger. 2021. The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious
Thought (New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality). Ohio State University
Press. $ 99.95
Is it
possible to rework a religion in order to serve emancipatory ends? From the
outset, the project seems not only futile but self-defeating. But less one
precipitates, Sneed’s proposal does not apply makeup on some old synthesis. For
Black religious thought has been classically a contradiction in movement: a
white God can only service white supremacy, exacerbating African-Americans’
extended slavery and misery. With science fiction (novels and films) and
experimental music, there emerge promising conceptions of God and religion that
are subversive to white supremacy. Artistically, Sneed qualifies these
conceptions as Afrofuturism. The book does not claim that blueprints are ready
or that meaningful liberation is imminent. Rather, Sneed claims Afrofuturism “disrupts
pervasive marking of race and destructive coding of Black bodies and existence
as inferior” (p. xii). It is a field of reflection that promises to propagate
toward a revolution.
The book
lies in eight chapters. Chapters one and two are an expansion of the
introduction. Chapters three to six are the blood-pumping parts of the
argument. Seven and eight are an extension of the conclusion and the
postscript. The first chapter examines how mainstream science fiction has built
quite a reputation for avoiding Blackness, a metastasis of slavery and
colonialism, and how Afrofuturism struggles to redress that avoidance. Sneed
observes that the science fiction genre remains condescending to Black authors
and audiences. And this repurposing functions in ways that are more than just
reversals of white supremacy.
The
second chapter clarifies the understanding that Black religious thought and
Black popular culture are not mutually exclusive or simply different
endeavours. It is precisely through Black popular culture that one can
understand the evolving practice of Black religious thought. Differently put,
Afrofuturism helps set a progressive Black religious thought. Ideologies such
as Black liberation or womanist theologies should be viewed as Afrofuturist
endeavours seeking to negotiate an empowering Black religious thought.
Afrofuturism cannot be dubbed as naively utopian.
The third
chapter finds Octavia Butler, an architect of intersectional Afrofuturism. With
the dystopian moments that her Parable series accentuate, women characters,
like Olmania, ensure historical continuity and exasperation with heterosexual
norms. According to Sneed, Butler galvanizes Black people through Earthseed, a
holistic religion that dares to revise sedimented conceptualizations of God.
The trickster God proposes openings for integrating Afrofuturism into humanism.
Queerness
in chapter four operates as salvation. Janelle Monáe’s select albums and
androids critically target misogyny, homophobia, racism, white supremacy, and
classicism. The pansexuality that defines her dramatis personae Cindi
Mayweather is her signature for reinventing the world so that pathologies
damaging Black experiences are reversed through Afrofuturistic imageries. The
disturbing recollections that viewers experience in slave auctioning her
androids as in: “Many Moons” underline the commodification of bodies; queer
dance becomes her blueprint to bypass prevalent instantiations of slavery.
Chapter
five specifies how Deep Space Nine (DS9) alters the trajectory set by the Star
Trek franchise. With Captain Benjamin Sisko, the protagonist of DS9, Black life
is no longer unidimensional. Through his “encounter with the Prophets (or
wormhole aliens)” (p. 78), Benny Russel or Sisko offers a sustained critique of
Black religious lives who trust in a God who is not outside space and time.
Chapter
six interrogates possibilities of emancipation in Black Panther, a 2018 film,
where Africa and Africans, through the imaginary republic of Wakanda, have
experienced neither slavery nor colonialism. Here, too, men lie beyond
salvation while women are saviours. Like her name suggests in Arabic, Nakia
stands for pure plentitude. Featuring Afrofuturistic films, western monotheism
and toxic masculinity are the invisible enemies.
As with
every sedimented concept is contested, Sneed examines in chapter seven those
creative attempts by Black liberationists to cancel time in order to undo
Christian eschatology. He notes how linear temporality sets Blackness for
defeat. In projecting the mythological content of Ancient Egypt into space,
Afrofuturists can conceive of an eschatology that targets the destruction of
white supremacy. Chronological time coerces African Americans to embrace false
history as the authentic ones.
Chapter
eight teases out the possibility of pressing Black science fiction to yield an
Afrofuturist identity and an Afrofuturist religious identity outside the church
to expand Black emancipation. The chapter reconnects the dots: Afrofuturism and
Black religious thought, focusing on the Afrofuturist doing the job of bridging
the gap. The conclusion showcases brief excursions into current development and
productions to outline future directions for Afrofuturistic religious thought.
In
stressing intersectionality (the rejection of hierarchization of oppressions)
as the way forward for Afrofuturism, I am afraid that Sneed has not well
registered Toni Morrison’s warning that racism functions as a distraction for
the work ahead. One cannot miss the postmodernist stance of rejecting causality
in intersectionality. Since equal preoccupation with gender or race flattens
serious engagement with the class. Besides, it is unclear how readers process
Butler’s mythical creation of Earthseed as intersectional and not as
foundational. It is one way of claiming that God “…does not need to break into
history, as it does not exist outside of history.” (p. 52) and is completely
different to say that God is the embodiment of change or a trickster and where
adherents have to develop an adaptive belief system literally. The first claim
is that Butler sees nothing new under the sun because the core principle that
defines humans is timeless. In the second, there is no core principle to begin
with. Likewise, deeming “Monáe’s resistance to male consumption [as] not
simultaneously resistant to capitalist consumption” (p. 66) questions the
relevance of intersectionality as a tenable approach for Afrofuturism.
I cannot
agree more with Sneed’s distinction between the erotic and pornographic in
Monáe’s Dirty Computer since “Cindi is less Frankenstein’s monster and more the
incarnation of the divine in cybernetic form.” (p. 68). Here, radical love
becomes accessible through radical alterity à la Hegelian Christ. But while
queerness is surely subversive, it cannot be revolutionary. When reading that
capitalism is not the enemy, and only white supremacy and heterosexism are,
then wonders if Monáe has truly seized why the capitalistic mode of production
values estrangement in and for itself. This mode of production cannot stand
heterosexual norms because it is precisely in heterosexuality where a real
potential for bypassing capitalism lies. Historical continuity dictates the
historical necessity to undo the über oppression and class exploitation. That
is why eschatological destination, as elaborated in chapter seven, remains
nowhere as nearly helpful. Sun Ra’s film points toward the posthuman. But
restarting life on another planet is exactly what white supremacists want
Blackness to do. This explains why Afrofuturism should avoid apocalyptic
preoccupations and the celebration of estrangement lest it engages in half a
revolution.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Ford,
Joseph. 2021. Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone
Algerian Literature. Lexington Books: New York and London. Kindle $ 45.00
In studying Francophone Algerian Literature of the
1990s, a period otherwise known as the Black Decade or la Décennie Noire, Ford
finds out that the literary outputs reify it instead of clarifying the
conflict. Indeed, literary outputs published by celebrity figures both
during the 1990s and after not only stay neutral before the ideological
struggle between the secular-and-military status quo on the one hand and their
Islamist contestants on the other but deem it their mission to testify for
posterity.
That war
was tagged cultural and simplified to the point of pitting progressivists
against depressives. Such a binary portrayal gained currency during the
post-Cold War context, where ideas of the clash of civilizations became the
Modus Operandi. Generations of Algerian authors, Ford specifies, have
uncritically fallen to that categorization less because they were complicit
with the state’s narrative but more due to channels of reception in France.
Often, those channels recourse to timeless portrayals that reactivated the
spectacle (never the essence) of Algeria’s war of independence: enlightened
Algerian democrats as Les pieds noirs against bearded medievalists,
reactivating FLN recidivists. Only from February 2019 onward, the literary
scene starts to disentangle this framing, counting some writers who dare to
explore the black decade with less bias and a satisfying complexity.
In
discussing Francophone Algerian literature, Ford follows a chronological
approach. Chapter One studies testimonial novels by authors such as Rachid
Mimouni. Written in realism, Mimouni’s novels, like Rachid Boujedra’s, have
been behind instituting the binary and reductive approach. To their credit,
Assia Djebar and Maïssa Bey practised restraint, specifying that they prefer
not to subscribe to either representation or testimony.
Chapter
Two explores the writings of Salim Bachi as the latter recourses to myth, a
promising mode of writing that breaks with Mimouni’s testimonial fiction. The
mythical undertaking registers his embrace for historical readings of the Black
Decade. But 9/11 sees him falling on the trope of the clash of
civilizations.
Chapter
Three focuses on imaginative outputs by Habib Ayoub. Here grotesque renditions
of leaders deconstruct the ways ordinary Algerians become complicit in
orchestrating their own apolitical lives. Both leaders and the subaltern
equally evoke the language of heroism besetting the war of
independence.
Chapter
Four examines Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête and finds that contrary
to the nuanced approach besetting the work, the framing of the work and its
reception by heavy French media and the polemics marking Daoud’s journalistic
writings have been behind a resurgence of the old binary lenses.
Chapter
Five reviews Mustapha Benfodil’s Archéologie du chaos (amoureux). Fords find
this work a bold statement elucidating its author’s dissatisfaction with the
testimonial mode and his radical disentangling from simplistic reading. Ford
assumes that conceptual experimentations such as ‘wild readings’ or les
lectures sauvages do reverse political power because complicity with the powers
that be is thought to be rooted in mistaken readings.
The
transition of the Algerian novel that addresses the Black Decade from the
realist to the mythical to the grotesque to quasi-historical to the modernist
mode of expression illustrates promising progress. Undoing the complicity of
oppositional discourses with the status quo can only be possible through
undoing the binary matrix that has stigmatized both the practices of power and
society throughout the Black Decade and since.
Ford
seems to be in awe of Benfodil’s experimentations and is somehow satisfied with
the overall evolution of Francophone Algerian authors’ perception of what took
place during the 1990s. Perhaps, he should read these experimentations for what
they are: mere lexical excitations. Benfodil’s spectacled readings cannot allow
him to fundamentally grasp the Black Decade or even the hirak of February 2019
as a class struggle. Grappling with Daoud’s fiction and journalism remains a
promising path for approximating that struggle irrespective of media
framings.
Fouad
Mami
Professor
of English
University
Ahmed Draia—Adrar, Algeria.
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Vitalis,
Robert. 2020. Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunts U.S.
Energy Policy. Stanford University Press; pp. 240
pages; Paperback: $22.00; Hardcover: $22.47; ISBN-10 :1503632598; ISBN-13:
978-1503632592
The
premise of Vitalis' book is that oil cannot be the bloodline of the U.S.
economy, least of all, of U.S. national security. There are several minerals (a
little over seventy) which the industrial world badly needs a constant and
secured supply of and which civilization itself cannot do without, but they are
not treated as important as oil. Such a state of affairs serves us in
questioning contents spread by news cartels! At least, the average observer has
never heard that this or that country has waged war or is willing to wage one
to ensure reliable shipments of aluminium or copper. What is it so special,
then, with oil? Precisely, what is at stake when it comes to oil?
According
to Vitalis, oil is less the story of oil, the crude matter, and more the story
of cooked data and produced-under-demand type of evidence. Powerful interest
groups and lobbies inside the U.S. corridors of power steer such data and
evidence toward selling the myth which nearly all people are born to embrace as
self-evident. Indeed, the fear of failing to ensure a constant supply of oil
(and strangely only) from the Persian Gulf is supposed to spell a trauma. The
myth sits on another no less powerful and enduring myth. Both science and
reason ensure that there has never been a dwindling supply of oil or any other
natural resources. As technology advances, enough reserves of all types of
minerals are constantly discovered. The only way to free the U.S. democracy,
nay, the very political system and ensure a solid role model for the rest of
the world is to shed off these myths. They cripple U.S. policy planners and
ruin the U.S. reputation in the world.
The book
comprises five chapters wherein the first serves as an introduction and the
last as a conclusion. Chapter One "Opening" sets the stage for
revisiting President Bush's conquest of Iraq in 2003. Since both then and now,
the argument goes that the U.S. acted on behalf of large Oil conglomerates. If
so, Vitalis rebuts. The proper and easiest way for the U.S. to access that oil
was to lift its own 1990s sanctions on Iraqi exports. Like this, oil companies
would have entered the market and the problem resolved. Besides, with the rise
of prices in the early 2000s, the abundance of hydraulically-fractioned oil has
made the U.S. a major producer of oil itself. The U.S. import of oil from the
Middle East is around 18 per cent.
Nevertheless,
"Junk social science" (p. 5) keeps the scary narrative aflame. In a
context where luminaries and public intellectuals are fixated on their myth of
'oil-as-power', the term 'oilcraft' recalls witchcraft more than statecraft.
Vitalis' analogy is a call towards dispelling confusion and talismanic
obsession by promoting a rationalized understanding of decisions about energy
policy. When the only evidence 'junk' social scientists provide is the rising
of prices, then one comes face to face with what Roger Stern ably calls
'oil-scarcity ideology' (p. 6). Vitalis stresses the method whereby every
statement we encounter in the archive should be taken with a grain of salt.
To
counter such an erroneous methodology, he proposes that readers must not
overlook three facts: 1- the world is rich in minerals; anyone has access to
raw materials. The possibility of oil-as-weapon is at best incorrect and a
'chimaera' (p. 14). Instead of embracing the confirmation bias, the abondance
should incentivize us to question what lies beyond the phenomenal; 2- the
imagined threats to oil supply—even when real—cannot be addressed militarily;
3- oil prices are dependent on other raw materials. A simple comparison of oil
prices against other minerals in the long durée—as Roger Stern does—will
conclude that oil cannot be the lifeblood of the American way of
life.
Chapter
Two, "Raw Materialism", posits that the idea of a single source being
of critical importance for a given national economy is reductionist at best and
misleading at worse. Vitalis brings to evidence proponents of the early
twentieth century Columbia School (scholars like Edward Mead Earle and William
S. Culbertson) wherein the latter notes that U.S. policy since 1918 has been
rooted in "bogeys" ranging from rapid depletion of natural resources
to British monopoly of these resources (pp. 26-7). Back then, like now, there
existed an industry behind the studies fueling these bogeys, infuriating the
public and policymakers alike about such imagined threats. Vitalis finds that
the idea of " 'control' of foreign oil fields" (p. 29) becoming a
priority for the U.S. economy has been sown in Americans' unconscious fairly
recently, during the 1990s. Culbertson finds that wars do not emerge from the
need to control or ensure extended supplies of raw materials but from the need
for markets to commercialize industrialized commodities. (p. 32) That is how
embracing mid-nineteen century protectionism triggers bouts of scarcity
syndrome. But a generation or two later, these findings made during the 1920s
were all forgotten. The Cold War context made it more likely that the Soviets
could threaten U.S. access to Middle East oil. Vitalis adds that even Noam
Chomsky falls into confirmation bias wherein "the progressives of the
1970s were a pale imitation of their 1920s ancestors." (p. 55) as they
just kept parroting criticism of American foreign policy without registering
the immanent discourse on oil or where that criticism might be heading.
Chapter
Three, "1973: A Time to Confuse", rereads the much-mediated event of
October 17, 1973, or the alleged OPEC oil embargo. Upon checking the evidence,
Vitalis finds the event was anything but a spectacle. Under no stretch of the
imagination, the event can be seriously called or even approximated to a threat
of cutting supplies, let alone an embargo. Back then, "only 7 per cent of
U.S. oil imports originated from the Middle East" (p. 57). Besides, Arab
nationalists only expressed a half-hearted and face-saving gesture in the wake
of their humiliating defeat against Isarel in June 1967—gestures meant for
popular consumption at home only.
Nevertheless,
the scarcity-thesis driven by media and the cult of trusting experts and
intellectuals for gaining monopoly made it look as if scarcity is imminent and
can usher at the end of the world. Vitalis discusses the five hundred pages
report by David S. Freeman's A Time to Choose, released when Americans were
experiencing long lines in gas stations. The report makes it super easy to jump
to the conclusion that the long queues were a reverberation from the
much-publicized shock that spelt serious disruptions of supply and all
presumably orchestrated by the Arab Embargo. In reality, though, OPEC
"sought a fairer share of the windfall." (p. 64) In its effort to
protect local crude producers from the effects of the unstable market, the U.S.
government used a preferential tariff with local crude producers. However, the
Nixon Administration decided in 1971 to reverse the preferential tariff policy
and open the U.S. market to non-American producers. This new policy, not OPEC's
action, explain the interruption in supply and long queues; the embargo was
only a surrogate. Far from disrupting supply, Arabs were terrified of losing
their market shares.
Chapter
Four, "No Deal", elaborates on the motoring principle behind the myth
that stipulates the invisibility of oil for the American policymaker. It is the
key chapter as it uncovers the motive behind portraying oil as the bloodline of
the American economy. Vitalis notes that this myth could not become as intense
as now without the fantasy-embraced-as-history. Given their nefarious stature
in consequence of 9/11, the Saudis, or Al Saud, more exactly: the ruling
oligarchs of Saudi Arabia, have invested heavily to paint themselves as
peace-loving and reliable suppliers of oil for the U.S. economy. They invented
a genesis for a presumed memorandum of understanding or a deal between King Ibn
Saud and President Franklin Roosevelt on board the destroyer U.S.S. Qunicy near
the end of World War II. The presumed deal which the author finds no trace in
the archives or the records hypothetically listed that the Saudis will ensure
reliable shipments of crude and the U.S., on its part, will guarantee the
protection of the king and his dynasty after him. Vitalis adds: "The only
problem is that no account of U.S.-Saudi relation for the next fifty years said
any such thing." (p. 87), underscoring a situation that leads anyone to
conclude that "The Saudis, the P.R. firms, and their many friends in
Washington would milk the meeting with F.D.R. for all it was worth after
2001". (p. 91) Indeed, Vitalis is aware that this Saudi fabrication counts
among the latest in the arsenal of forgeries specifying the invisibility of
oil. Differently put, the deceit and the fable could not go unnoticed without
interest groups at home. These interest groups profit from recycling oil
dollars in the U.S. economy through purchases of U.S. treasury bonds, consumer
goods and, of course, armament bills with astronomical price tags attached to
them. That is how it is for the long-term interest of the U.S. to distance
itself from a retrogressive and degenerate monarchy. That proximity does
considerable damage to the status of the U.S. as a superpower. The crumbling of
the Saudis' rule will be an event that will boost, not hinder, U.S. supremacy
or at least its leadership credentials.
Chapter
Five, "Breaking the Spell", concludes Oilcraft by reclaiming each
chapter's key pieces of the argument. Vialis starts with underlying that
"[p]opular and scholarly beliefs about oil-as-power also have no basis in
fact" (p. 122). But the irony that the myth posits is that policymakers
who sincerely want to break from this fixation can do little to break the immanent
structure whereby oil is received as invisible. The assumptions are that
powerful that any attempt to go against them ends in discrediting, if not
ridiculing, the credible policymaker. Hence, the first step of leaving that
fixation starts with getting the scholarship correct, never allowing unchecked
opinions to go for knowledge. Knowledge starts by first making sure that crude
producers have no choice but to sell their outputs. Before harming the U.S.
economy, cutting supplies will strangle their economies and destabilize their
hold on power. Second, one needs to be certain that besides the fact that
deploying an army to protect crude supplies cannot be tenable and efficient,
the deployment itself raises tensions and causes supply interruptions. Third,
the Middle East is a volatile space, and it does not behove a superpower to be
constantly dragged into the mess out there. Fourth, by the same depleted logic
of scarcity, why does not the U.S. go and chase bauxite, tungsten, tin, rubber
lest other powers appropriate them? Fifth, there lies the fallacy with which
the degenerate left sells its credentials: as soon as the U.S. steps out of the
Middle East, "the fossil-capital-led order" will fall all on its own
hence an era of plenitude automatically emerge. In the end, Vitalis notes that
"Oilcraft today [has] hijack[ed] the mind of the scientifically
literate" (p.128), speaking less of the average person whereby oil passes
as an explanation for almost every that is wrong with the world today. Sixth,
Saudis' money should not be allowed to finance studies. Funding (Vitalis
rightly calls it "the paid-to-think-tanks" p. 131) will only bring
about pseudo-science whose consequences are more confusion and befogged
policies, but the propaganda which the funding generates will cover for the
asphyxiation of liberties in the Middle East and the world at large. In the
end, Vitalis rightly addresses the U.S. policymaker: "why fear an Arabia
without Sultans?" (p. 133)
Vitalis
finds that well-intentioned and respectful policymakers and advisers stay
disabled in the face of the enduring myths. Over the decades, these myths have
taken a larger dimension than life. He is correct that the journey to undo
their effect starts with unbiased research. But there are instances where
Vitalis' reliance on Posen's suspicion of the ideology that oil is all but
powerful recalls the theory that colonies cost metropolitan centres more than
what the latter could squeeze value out of them. But his subsequent elaboration
that correlation does not necessarily lead to causation lifts the confusion.
Perhaps
what remains missing in Vitalis' discussion of Columbia scholars' findings of
the 1920s regarding those in favour of open trade and their opponents is how
during the time where capital expansion needed nationalism, oil was treated
(and for good reasons) as the lifeblood. Vitalis indirectly calls for updating
sedimented thinking since capitalistic growth since the 1920s (exactly after
WWI) is not conditioned on the old mystique view of oil-as-bloodline, given the
abundance of supply. Producers cannot afford to withdraw crude from buyers lest
they risk losing their share in a highly competitive market. Similarly, no
major power can hinder access to oil because oil remains evenly available
everywhere.
At play,
there have been two temporalities of capital accumulation, not one: formal and
real dominations. The two temporalities explain why Moon notes the necessity
(which is, in fact, Karl Marx's) that animate these temporalties wherein
occupying a colony becomes financially inhibitive after WWI. Self-less or
anonymous capital is self-regulating at an advanced stage of primitive
accumulation. Differently put, during the era of real domination (post-1918),
there cannot be a need for a class of bourgeois pioneers to intervene. That
explains why the bourgeois class has disappeared. In its place, there emerged a
capitalistic class who controlled nothing yet. They pretend they are in charge
of managers/administrators (C.E.O.s) appointed by shareholders to speak on
behalf of the latter interest. Hence in this context, we read of Parker T.
Moon's quote where "raw materials are colour-blind." (p. 36) and that
colonies are a burden to maintain.
Likewise,
Vitalis' analysis in Chapter Four dwells on the corruption of the Saudis, and
their dizzying pace of change 'from camels to Cadilliacs' (p. 95) paid for by
oil rent may sound racist stays inconsequential in the overreaching impact of
oil wealth. For that, oil wealth decides less their conservative outlook but
more significantly intensifies their adamant predisposition against the
founding of the semblance of an egalitarian polity all over the MENA (the
Middle East and North Africa) region. The counter-revolution that quelled the
uprisings of the Arab Spring both in 2011 and 2019 have been fueled and
financed by their medieval outlook. On the aside, Vitalis notes that with
recycled petrodollars, the Saudi acquired F-15 jets that have been since March
2015 bombing civilians in Yemen. But he could have pushed his liberal outlook a
little further by noting that worse than the F-15s lies the regressive and
ultra-conservative brand of the faith whose sole agenda appears to be the
crashing all social movements that promised to propagate towards a lifestyle
free from the dictatorship of oil.
Overall,
there are instances where Vitalis' debunking of myths such as 'oil-as-power'
falls into the right, and there are other instances where the same debunking
falls more into the left. Still, sometimes he can be counted even as a devout
communist. But the undecidability of classification is the quality of great
scholarship, where he passionately elucidates his points regardless of class or
ideology. Indeed, Vitalis embraces his mission to eradicate facile portrayals
because masquerading beneath so-called 'self-evident conclusions' lies not only
the perpetuation of mistaken decisions but the squandering of the U.S.
taxpayers' savings as well subaltern of the MENA chances for a future in
dignity.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
Moore,
Wayétu. 2018. She Would be King: A Novel. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis,
Minnesota. 311pp. Hardcover: $15.99. ISBN-10: 1555978177; ISBN-13:
978-1555978174
It is
less of a tautology to claim that orthodox historians to this day have read the
abolition of slavery, a step first taken by Britain in 1807 and followed later
by other powers, as the event that ushered in a reversal of chattel slavery.
Nevertheless, the end of chattel slavery for Wayétu Moore in She Would Be King
(2018), underlies a regression towards wage labour, a policy deemed far worse
than slavery, ensuring not only a second life of the nefarious institution but
also the foundation of a system wherein workers prostitute themselves every
single working day in contrast to slaves who were sold once or twice in a
lifetime.
In the
author’s eye, wage labour stands for that descent into the proletarization of
people and communities, their systemic impoverishment through the appropriation
of their labour time, amounting to civil wars and overall societal unrest.
Readers may recall that Moore’s stated objective from writing the novel has
been her attempt to specify the reasons that lead to Liberia’s civil war
(1989-1997) during which she, a toddler (born in 1985), and her family were
forced to flee the country and settle in the US. It is worth recalling that
Liberia is the first nation-state in Africa. Its independence dates back to
1847, well before countries such as South Africa, Egypt or even Ethiopia. But
the country has remained largely unstable and the advantage of Moore’s novel is
that it promises to take its reader to the motoring principle behind that
instability and violence, that is, to the foundation of wage labour system.
Moore’s
early attempts in fiction writing is a children book titled: I Love Liberia
(2011). She similarly champions a non-profit business adventure called ‘One
Moore Book’. Note the pun in ‘Moore’, highlighting both the word ‘more’ and the
author’s last name. The project aims at circulating “… culturally relevant
books to children who are underrepresented and live in countries with low
literacy rates.”(1) Besides, Moore’s faith in the universal extension of
knowledge to unfortunate young minds underscores her initial cause of
dispelling illusions and falsehoods, including those that have put Liberia on
the road of misery, impoverishment and interminable wars.
Several
observers and experts will keep reiterating that behind that generalized
instability and descent into bloody civil wars lies the same people’s
backwardness, incapacity to found an enduring social contract and endemic
divisions between multiple social components. All these factors should perhaps
be approached with a grain of salt because the listed ‘reasons’ subscribe more
to the logics of justification, not explanations. Indeed, such arguments are
culturalist in nature and all they succeed in achieving is to blame the victims
and, in the meanwhile, lift the blame from the real harm-inflictors, both
people and structures. The present essay underscores the need to consider the
author’s approach and setting of the story, since taking that into
consideration, I claim, can be conducive to register exactly what happened, and
the way in which what indeed happened (not that which is fancied as what
happened) had ushered in in the long term the civil war of the 1990s.
The
differential between that which indeed happened and that which portends to have
happened is a historiography that promises to propagate towards universal
emancipation. Leaving that which triggered the author’s own exile unexamined is
to remain stuck in superficialities-sold-as-histories, with the cost of
ensuring that cycles of violence will not only keep emerging but those cycles’
rhythm will have to be confronted with a telling regularity.
Before
detailing on wage labor, there exists the need to broach first on several
social players of modern Liberia as traced by the author in She Would be King.
We find at least two main components: the first is the Vai and other
indigenous communities as represented by Gbessa’s story in the early part of
the novel, offering a window into precolonial life in an African village before
European intrusion. Through the stigmatization of Gbessa on the ground of her
‘ill-fated’ birth date, Moore illustrates that precolonial life, that is, well
before the incursion of European powers into the continent’s interiors, life in
Africa was far from being either idyllic or perfect. Readers find that Gbessa
is cursed simply because her birth date coincides with an event interpreted as
a bad omen. Through no fault of her own, and at the age of eight, Gbessa is
sentenced to die by abandoning her in the deep jungle. Her parents are
ostracized for bringing a child on a ‘wrong’ day, overlooking how the wrong day
is wrong only in the calendar of alienation!
The
second category of social actors are returnees, victims of slavery but who
found themselves obliged (like June Dey) or entreated (like Norman Aragon) to
return and find peace in Monrovia. Let us recall that these last two characters
are themselves descendants of enslaved Africans who do not necessarily come
from Libera, or even nearby localities such as the Ivory Coast or Ghana.
Throughout the decades and even the centuries, the first enslaved people died
and their enslaved descendants simply retained “Africa” or its idea less as
their place of origin and more as a place where they used to be free, their
humanity round and unquestioned. It should be noted that places such as
Cameroon, Nigeria, Tanzania or the Congo are recent inventions that come with
colonial expansionist plans and labels since by the time chattel slavery become
generalized, these appellations (not places) simply did not exist.
In She
Would be King, we find this affinity with Africa, less as a geographical space
or biological affiliation and more as an existential attachment to a promise
for emancipation with Nanni, Norman’s mother. Despite having the choice to live
among several Maroon communities in Jamaica, Nanni always feeds Norman, her
son, the obligation to leave Jamaica and to re-join Africa. To seize on her
steadfastness in bonding with Africa, readers cannot miss how she endures
Callum’s pseudo-scientific whims, slavery and even rape, all for the sake of
earning a boarding passage to Africa. Africa, she seizes, is both the physical
territory and mental space conceptualized as existential freedom, a radical
breach with the reductionism of one’s humanity that underlies her life as a
slave. Nanni, Norman and June Dey, as elaborated below, are Pan-Africanists
avant la lettre. Well before the foundation of the early to mid-twentieth
century movement of Pan-Africanism, we read that slaves in the Americas
entertained not only exalted dreams but elaborate plans to equally find and
found freedom in Africa. Alternatively, freedom became synonymous with their
idea of Africa. The two are intricately attached so much so that they serve as
a prerogative for Africa-as-freedom and freedom-as-African.
The
runaway slave June Dey similarly comes from a tobacco plantation in Virginia,
named Emerson. His biological father is a slave from a neighbouring plantation
who was cheaply sold to the Emersons in the hope of saving the crumbling
plantation capital and helping it regain its former wealth and glory. We read
that June Dey’s father, June, killed the overseer in his last incarcerating
place because that overseer had killed his wife and baby. June is subsequently
killed in Emerson because he dared to defend his second family, the one he founded
after arriving at Emerson and from this union June Dey is born. June Dey’s
biological mother, Charlottes, occupies a mixed space between a domestic and
field hand. During the day she serves in the mansion but at night she sleeps in
a shack with other field slaves. She too was brutally murdered soon after
getting rid of June. Their baby christened Moses, was trusted to Darlene, a
domestic slave and another victim of the infamous system. Even when no one
dared to divulge a single word in respect to his father’s feats, June Dey or
Moses truly stands to his biblical sake name. The insurrectionary spirit
becomes contagious and is transferred from father to son nevertheless. He was
raised as a domestic, but when Mr Emersons decides to dispense with some slaves
in order to raise funds for a second nearby plantation that would plant cotton,
June Dey leads the insurrection that brings the Emerson plantation and its
expansionist plans all down.Indeed, we read that the two June Dey and Norman
Aragon are repatriated to Monrovia: Norman because that was his mother’s dying
wish but for June Dey the trip was totally unplanned. After his spectacular
fight against the masters of Emerson, the opportunity presented itself as the
runway June Dey is knocked out of consciousness and finds himself in a ship,
run by the famous American Colonization Society (ACS) and is bound for Africa.
All over the 1840s, the ACS used to raise resources from the US Congress to
secure the repatriation of both free and freed Africans to Liberia. Meanwhile,
the ACS established a footing for US imperial planners during the heated race
for colonies.
When
knowing that even Gbessa too had been in exile as she was excommunicated from
her village on the pretext of being cursed, the three characters conceive of
Africa less as a place of origin and more as a promise for greater, that is,
communal emancipation. This suggests how readers are invited to favour
ideological affiliation, not biological association. Indeed, Norman and June
Dey meet outside the Monrovia prison searching for ways of reaching Freetown
which is much of a mythical land and which involves how it is less a physical
territory and more of a life journey.
Why
underlying the symbolic meaning of the land? Lest Africa is fetishized, the
simple act of setting foot in Africa registers as just the beginning of the
journey, the commencement of the arduous work, neither an end in itself nor a
call for passive resignation. Moore’s vision for Africa serves the facilitation
of encountering like-minded individuals to unite the efforts and beat up
against intruders for collective and communal emancipation. Encountering Gbessa
when she is literally on the verge of death (she has been beaten by a snake),
Norman has been at that point looking for a medicinal herb (significantly, a
living root—not one that is cut) to attend to June Dey’s terrible stomachache.
Instead of caring for one, Norman has now to attend to two patients whom he
barely knows. He could have simply abandoned them to their fate and carried out
his journey alone. But he realized that a journey is meaningless without
companions and fellow travellers. Once this initial task of caring for the
physical well-being of committed Africans is successfully carried out, facing
intruders both local and foreign is next on the agenda. The three face French
soldiers as the latter are burning villages and driving the inhabitants into
the slave market. Unparalleled feats of success are achieved as Norman and June
Dey save the villagers and they all eventually mount a rebellion against the
French enslavers. Historically, France was a latecomer in the slave trade and
France grudgingly abolished slavery as late as 1848. French enslavers take
Gbessa a prisoner; later, she is stabbed and is left bleeding. But Gbessa’s
curse specifies that she cannot die. She stands for the undying spirit of
insurrection, which explains why soon enough, we meet Gbessa in Mr Johnson’s
mansion, taken care of by Maisy, a servant. Understandably, Mr Johnson plays a
prominent role in the young and independent republic of Liberia.
By
then, the narrative may look like it slides into insignificant preoccupations:
Gbessa’s marriage with a prominent army lieutenant, Gerald Tubman, in the then
newly founded Liberian army. The union starts as a marriage of convenience but
eventually becomes rotating around love. The new elites of settlers badly
desire peace. How else to achieve that peace and trust with the unruly tribes
of the interior except through a marriage with Gbessa? The union stands as a pledge,
not a testimony, that Liberia will hopefully remain a single and functional
entity. June Dey and Norman are now mixing with the crowds. But the mixed
marriage should not lend a superficial reading of the novel. Already, readers
notice that within early Liberian high society, composed of individuals who
themselves had been slaves or had experienced slavery at a close range in
pre-civil war America have themselves resorted, however indirectly, to
enslaving practices in the form of wage labour.
Maisy’s
fate, when closely considered, speaks volumes. Kidnapped is one of the last
enslaving raids, her entire tribe was annihilated. As a sole survivor, she is
now a servant of Mr Johnson. The latter is presumably a popular leader of the
young nation but in fact he is the spokesperson of the settlers, those now
powerful people repatriated by the ACS. In a dialogue between prominent ladies,
Miss. Ernestine raises the remark that in being a house servant Maisy brings
unhappy reminiscences regarding the fate of domestic slaves on plantations in
the antebellum United States. The snide remark is swiftly answered with a tinge
of irony where Mrs Johnson points at the rumours which circulate how Miss.
Ernestine could be abusing the native inhabitants in her coffee plantations,
treating them like field slaves, implying that she perhaps should mind her own
business before attending to others.
The
conversation between the ladies, however calm in tone and seemingly casual,
even friendly, remains eye-opening. What cannot be missed, however, is how
these early founders of the Republic of Liberia were not only conscious of the
cultural divisions between the inhabitants but were also aware of the long-term
consequences of these divisions. The bombastic and celebrations attitudes of starting
a social order that promises to be a rupture with the practices of the past and
its institutions, such as slavery, is now increasingly challenged. The ladies,
as the exchange illustrates, are in no way fooled by the promises of new or
egalitarian beginnings, allowing us to fundamentally question the chances of
new beginnings or how the idea of new beginnings serves as a strategy to fool
idiots and simpletons. Engrossed in their thriving businesses, the founding
elites were aware that they were leaving behind other social actors and that
marginalization would be a time-bomb, which if not immediately addressed,
social unrest and even generalized instability will transpire into the future.
Nevertheless, each selfishly clanged to short term interests and business
calculations. Interests and calculations turned out in the long run to be
costly miscalculations.
The
natives, non-educated members of the interior tribes, were treated by returnees
from Jamaica, the US and other places (who were mostly enslaved) as
second-class citizens. Reading the history of coups in Liberia, it is these two
social players that constantly seek to undo and cancel each other. Even in the
civil war that pushed the author’s own parents to leave for the US, it was
Charles Tylor ousting Samuel Doe. The latter comes from the Krahn ethnic group,
whereas Tylor is a descendant of the socially upscale minority, a descendant of
nineteenth-century returnees from the US. The feud is more about who holds
monopolies over-extraction licenses for foreign companies to mine gold and
diamond. Still, the feud is exacerbated by the historical divide that goes back
to Liberia’s unhappy foundation. This divide ushered in yet another cycle of
violence and looting for diamonds and other valuables. Both Tylor and Doe met
with a violent end and both were re-enacting the feud between on the one hand
descendants of former slaves, who to this day think themselves more entitled to
rule since they have been more civilized and on the other descendants of native
inhabitants, who excel in selling their credentials as the eternal victims of
the brain-washed former slaves!
This
brings readers back to She Would be King where lieutenant Gerald suggests at
first and later instructs Gbessa not to manually work in the farm, and to call
for the help of the plenty servants he is hiring so that she can lead a life of
a lady. As the wife of a dignitary in the young republic, he wants her only to
supervise the workers simply because Gbessa is now a society woman and her
social manners should reflect the social pomp of members of the high class. Any
other Gbessa’s reaction, Gerald reasons, reflects poorly on him, his social
status as well as his chances of promotion. Naturally, his eye lies on more
prominent roles in the leadership of the young nation. In his mind, he did not
marry Gbessa to remain ‘stuck’ with a secondary role in the army or
administrating the barracks. Readers may evoke how Gbessa reacts: despite the
plentiful abundance of servants/slaves, she adamantly rejects and prefers to
carry out domestic duties, both indoors, in the garden and the adjacent field,
herself. Readers find out that Gbessa was particularly mindful not to charge
the numerous servants and workers with any task, domestic or otherwise. For
her, the practice however inadvertent summons slavery. No one can pretend that
the fresh memory of the inhuman practice is not overshadowing people’s everyday
interactions. Closely considered, the practice itself, not just its fresh
memory, casts its gloomy footprints on wage labour, rendering the latter
anti-egalitarian. Thus, wage labour sows the seeds of socio-political
fragmentation and disharmony.
Bourgeois
economics specifies that hiring aids and workers falls into the eternal norm of
the division of labour where each individual works according to his or her
skills set and fairly receives remuneration according to the tasks executed.
Only the division of labour—through wage labour—found the basis of civilization,
according to the same bourgeois theoreticians. But in line with Karl Marx’s
elaborations on the division of labour in The German Ideology (1848), Gbessa
categorically rejects this commonsensical presupposition and deems it in
service of justification, not an explanation.Indeed, the system of labour does
not consider the worker’s actual coercion to grudgingly accept a wage in
exchange for the task performed. In addition to seeking excellent and skilled
performances, the division of labour primarily shuts means of independent
subsistence, of that genuine aspiration of making a living without being forced
to work for some boss or a hiring institution. Thus, wage labor, Gbessa reasons
fuels inequality and sows seeds of generalized instability.
Readers
of the novel note how Gbessa’s soulmate, Safua, raises a rebellion against the
leaders of the new republic because of the communal values which the wage
system has been busily destroying. The Vai community–like several in the
pre-colonial setting—cherish communal freedom. The Vai resisted the
appropriation of their grazing lands and fiercely rejected domestication
through wage labour. Now it is Safua’s son who is in charge of resistance.
Readers close reading Moore’s novel wherein Gbessa hopes against hope to stop the
bloodbath, making sure not to pit the Vai against the settlers who are now the
de facto rulers in Monrovia. Hence, the idea of Gbessa being king, as suggested
in the title, should be taken as a pun: both a king and its negation, since
Gbessa is a woman and the right expectation is rewarding her with the title of
queen, not king, for active attempts to lift violence and foster the sense of
citizenship among suspecting and uncooperative interior tribes. Indeed, Moore’s
title squeezes her project as one that is radically egalitarian. In refusing to
call the aid of workers and domestics, Gbessa rejects the title of king or
queen. She views the title not only as the expression of an unearned or
undeserved privilege but simply as the formalization of wage labour, the
essence of slavery and disharmony.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way%C3%A9tu_Moore
Al-Aswany,
Alaa. 2021. The Republic of False Truths: A Novel. Knopf: New York and London.
Trans. S. R. Fellowes; pp. 416; Hardcover: $ 24.49; ISBN-13: 978-0307957221by Fouad Mami
Theoretical
Clarity and Revolutionary Change: The Arab Spring in Fiction
Alaa
Al-Aswany’s fictional engagement with the events known as the Arab Spring may
easily seem pointless, cliché or commonsensical given the tons of films, novels
and studies on the topic. But it is exactly what the title underscores for
English reading audiences in his recently translated novel, The
Republic of False Truths (2021) that raises his work above the waters
of cliché and commonsensical. Unlike its Arabic title which connotes the
farcical element in the quasi-republic, the English title zooms on the false
omnipresent that applies uninterruptedly on everyone in that republic,
irrespective of class or gender. Known internationally for The
Yacoubian Building (2002), the recent addition explains (and never
justifies) the existential need to grapple with precisely that which most
people uphold as unmistakably self-evident. Indeed, when presumably unbiased
research articles, speak less of private blogs or contents in either heavy or
social media outlets, find the social uprisings that led to the decapitation of
the likes of Mubarak “decisively deprived of traditional narratives and are
haunted by the theme of death…”[1], then
the self-evident is no longer that self-evident. More often
than not, resorting to abstractions—as with this presumable research piece—is
triggered by this authorless for exploring the essence of the experience and
more to evaporate that experience from the radar of the social field. Indeed,
this academic facilitates the expulsion of reality from history by borrowing
from a preexisting pool of vocabulary and set of thinking structures that
masturbates endlessly on death, the limits of narrative’s agency or the Kantian
sublime.
In this
connection, Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths serves in
reversing similar masturbations and lies. Lest they fall to collective amnesia,
the novel recreates the events leading to the euphoria of Tahrir Square in 2011
and 2012, the decapitation of the dictatorship’s head and a few swirling events
afterwards. In answer to anyone doubting the relevance from synthesizing those
events in a story, just ask that person: where is Tahrir Square today in the map
of Cario? Of all seventy-three chapters comprising the novel, chapter
thirty-one explicitly answers: “Tahrir Square has been transformed into a small
independent republic—the first parcel of Egyptian land to be liberated from the
dictator’s rule.” (184) Little wonder then how now it has become an
interminable construction site with the specific objective of eradicating from
collective memory the very possibility of massive gathering which may or may
not propagate into a revolt. If a physical space has garnered such a monumental
level of hatred and revenge, then unbiased rationalizations of historical
reality, let alone activists’ narratives of the popular uprising, remains an
unaffordable indulgence. Not for nothing, the early twentieth-century French philosopher/
activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) finds: “Official history is a matter of
believing murderers on their own words…”[2] For
if events that unfolded in most readers’ own lifetime, that is, only the other
day, are decreed disconcerting and are now being falsified, there is more
reason to distrust official reporting of incidents that happened where we were
less aware or not on this planet yet. It is never a tautology to underscore
that history writing is thus no joke.
In this
context, Al-Aswany’s novel does not shy from the task of setting things, events
and people in their correct historical order. It measures these actors as
variables in the scale of the experienced unfolding, not mythical or
ideological unravelling. There will be people who may find that measurement
missing in the scale of revolutionary ardour and passion, but what can be more
radical and subversive than an honest elucidation of that which actually
happened and happens. Understandably, there exist vested interests to report on
that which took place in Tahrir from bourgeois’ perspective, and to justify the
counterrevolutionary status quo of the present. Hence, the explanatory (never
the justificatory) demand for a methodological axis serving also an existential
matrix whereby falsity (false truths in the title) can be distinguished from
truth. Al Aswany’s theoretical coordinates have been history’s inevitable
‘class struggle’.
The term
‘class struggle’ comes from a glossary that for better or for worse has been
antinomic vi-à-vis the current counterrevolutionary climate of post-2011 Arab
World. Let us recall that several Arab cities and capitals witnessed
exhilarating agitations and marches in millions against dictators only to be
disappointed in the following months and years. The term ‘class struggle’ is
not just an ideological milestone for those activists of social movements on
the left; it is a methodological eye-opener for registering and thus seizing
the real movement of the world, according to the nineteenth-century German
philosopher Karl Marx[3]. The
concept expresses a historical continuity with uprisings and revolutions of the
oppressed from all over the world and from times both past and to come, and if
enough oppressed people embrace the class struggle as a milestone for
consciousness, the current world order will be not just shaken but redefined.
Hence why the powers that be have always had a vested interest in sweeping the
term ‘class struggle’, speak less of the concept, under the rug.
Through
mostly written entries and dynamic interactions between a set of characters and
via reading mostly their entries: Ashraf Wissa, General Alwany, Seikh Shamil,
Asma Zanaty, Mazen Saqqa, Madam Nourhan and Essam Shaalan along with others
readers will gain a solid understanding of what took place in Tahrir. Each
character emerges from diametrically opposing backgrounds, and the novel
reflects the class dimension of the uprising. Only when considered from the
point of view of the class struggle, readers unveil how the counterrevolution
justifies the present status quo in effusive abstractions and unabashed
crusades for chasing smokescreens: death and the presumed wisdom of/in
extinction!
Given
this connection, The Republic of False Truths (2021)
resuscitates the concept of the ‘class-struggle’ for purposes of underlying
needed, if not urgent, theoretical clarity. Part of Al-Aswany’s demystification
showcases that well before the restoration (July 2013) formally triumphed, most
rank-and-file Egyptians expressed varying levels of exasperations at
revolutionaries. Perhaps, apart from the heady eighteen days leading to the
abdication of President Mubarak and which were marked by euphoria and
spectacle, the following weeks and months witnessed a steady decline in the
supply of people living in impoverished and destitute neighbourhoods since most
of these people become disenchanted from the revolutionary project. Ironically,
those people beset by black misery themselves turned hostile of the very
process that promises the breaking of their chains. Counting as the evidence
for this state of affairs is how the oppressed accuse the revolutionary youth
of jeopardizing their security by conspiring against the country.
When
Ashraf Wissa and his team display the atrocities of the military through a
moving cinema project across impoverished Cairo neighbourhoods, he and his tiny
group of activists were attacked, their gadgets broken and themselves are
accused of bringing disaster. Instead of despair, Al-Aswany’s unorthodox conclusion
zooms on a needful theoretical clarity, the one that attributes the failure of
the revolution less to coercion by the repressive forces and more to the
oppressed own conservatism, nihilistic resignation and detachment from
revolutionary agitation. In the interest of fairness, Al-Aswany shows that the
military intervened only when the majority was fed up; repression came to
formalize what the oppressed themselves desired to restore: security. Without a
precise reading regarding the role of various actors, revolutionaries will
remain befogged with myths and self-pity. Even if repression has been behind
the resignation of the oppressed, and not the other way around, a legalistic
and procedural response will be still inconsequential. By pushing for an unsubstantiated
narrative (confusing cause with effect), Al-Aswany unveils the plans of
counterrevolution. Once activists’ attention is sidetracked toward the
legalistic, as when denouncing human rights abuses, the revolutionaries
pronounced their own death sentence. No one else did.
Still,
mounting criticism in regard to the ways in which the revolutionaries responded
does not mean that Al-Aswany favours the culturalist approach, whereby the
oppressed are blamed for their own misery. The Republic of False Truths hinges
its revolutionary project on a deeply entrenched historicist approach. The
narrative has been careful with its vocabulary and plot details lest it embarks
on blaming the victims, and thus falls into justification, not an explanation.
Little wonder how this revolutionary-counterrevolutionary arch spells the
fortunes and misfortunes of not only the Egyptian revolution but nearly of all
Arab socialist uprisings. Certainly, Al-Aswany’s remarks connect directly with
the Egyptian scenario, but in essence, his remarks mirror most, if not all,
Arab revolutions post 2011.
Pushing
for a culturalist approximation of events counts among the reactionaries’
toolkit in a preexisting arsenal to regain hegemony. Given the brutal violence
that marked the Egyptian revolution, the one which many activists fail to
register as the formalization of the subaltern’s dissatisfaction with the
revolution, it is not surprising to mistake The Republic of False
Truths as an exercise in oriental despotism. Female activists, like
Asma, and after experiencing beatings and sexual abuse, utters statements that
read more like self-pity. For her, it is hopeless to count on ordinary people
as Egyptians are submissive by nature. Other characters too do not restrain
themselves from drawing similar generalizations outside space and time as they
express doubts vis-à-vis revolutionary change in a country where large sways of
the populations are doubtful in the betterment of their lot. Asma’s letter to
Mazen, sent from London after the former’s exile is probably the type of
ranting that every revolutionary succumbs to in the face of adverse situations.
Such despair risks eternalizing oriental despotism because it overlooks the
dynamic of history. Despaired readings find the cliché of Oriental despotism
comforting.
Al
Aswany, not only rejects timeless generalizations. His spokesperson is Mazen
who from beginning to end underlines a historicist approximation as to why
ordinary Egyptians—even well before instantiations of violence—traded security for
freedom. Nevertheless, the heavy investment in media and the latter capacity
for brainwashing rank-and-file Egyptian and demonizing the revolutionary
youth—as specified by General Alwany’s explicit instructions—have simply born
its fruits. In an exchange with the Interior Minister, General Alwany
explicitly outlines his strategy: “Our goal is to tell the ordinary citizen,
‘Either you side with the demonstrations and lose your security, or you side
with the state, in which case, it will protect you.” (142) Readers find that
the business tycoon and media mogul, Hag Muhammad Shanawany, as per request of
the Security Apparatus, have invested enormous funds and resources to ‘redirect
Egyptians towards ‘the right path’: family values and the wisdom of the tested
and tried’. His media prodigies go as far as uncovering imagined CIA plots of
destabilizing the country and creating chaos! Readers registers how Madam
Nourhan, the celebrity broadcaster, has been hailed by Apparatus not only for
literally abiding by the instructions set by the supervising army officer (set
in the premises of every TV and radio station), but for her ‘innovative’ ways
and quasi-effortless commitment in defaming revolutionaries, presenting
fabricated testimonies that cast democracy activists as spies on the pay roll
of foreign secret services. Through no fault of their own, the revolutionary
committee realizes never without a cost that exclusive campaigning
through Facebook and Twitter has its limits
as large sways of Egyptians remain hooked up to newspapers and TV. By the time
revolutionaries such as Ashraf started touring neighbourhoods and featuring
human rights abuses committed by the military, it has become crystal clear that
it was too late. Therefore, any sensible reading cannot overlook that the
triumph of the counterrevolution has been the result of a steady and deliberate
effort to rewrite history in favour of the counterrevolutionaries since they
can afford this rewriting.
In the
final scene Madany (literally signifying passivism in Arabic) or Khaled
father’s, takes revenge from the police officer who killed Khaled. Al-Aswany
through that scene kills two birds with one stone. On the first level, he
breaks away with the liberal stance of situating revolutionary work entirely in
passivist forms of agitation. His stance corroborates, however, with the
inevitability of the class struggle, demonstrating an affinity with Frantz
Fanon’s ideas on the necessity of violence: where history simply takes its own
course and classes become involved in a dynamic of cancelling each other. On
the second, a milestone of theoretical clarity is gained from the failure of
the legalistic and procedural path and where justice fails to see the day of
light. The crooked justice system in Egypt facilitates regaining that
incendiary form of clarity. Not only the bereaved father refuses religious
authority personified in Sheikh Shamil’s mediation as when the Sheikh visits
Madany with a sack of cash in exchange for closing the case in court. Madany
similarly indulges Khaled’s university colleagues for a while, agreeing with
their plan of taking the murder case to court. Danaya, General Alwany’s
daughter and Khaled’s close classmate and eye witness to the murder, asks
Madany to relieve her from witnessing in court. Despite enamoured admiration of
and attachment to Khaled and his ideals, in the end, her admiration and
attachment could not expand toward a revolutionary consciousness in the sense
of a rupture with undeserved social status and privilege. That is how we read
in the ultimate scene that the father hires thugs to kill the police officer.
And that is how readers are not surprised as Madany successfully reverses the
crooked justice system by taking justice (not just trying to) into his own
hands.
The
message from that scene helps readers seize the realization that revolutionary
work cannot be a cerebral undertaking. It is and remains a spontaneous eruption
and, in his circumstances, no one can convince Madany not to recourse to
violence. He spontaneously takes that road not because he thinks only violence
brings him a satisfying closure, but despite all rationalizations to the
contrary. Readers find Madany has lived his entire life as a slave, literally
from hand to mouth. But that dreadful experience subscribes in direct
opposition to appearances. Galvanized by his prodigy, Danya asks Khaled: “When
did you read all these books?” Khaled answers: “The credit should go to my
father who noticed that I liked to read when I was small, so he gave me a
subscription to the palace of culture. I began borrowing books, reading and
returning them. Imagine that a simple, uneducated man could value reading so
much!” (83) If there exists one hero in this novel, it is Madany because when
catastrophe hits, he rationalizes light years better than university
professors! As will be developed below, Madany deserves the title of Spartacus
defying the decadent Roman empire.
Madany’s
decision is different from poetic justice in the sense that the latter is
bourgeois whereas the former is prehistoric and can only be embraced by the
subaltern. Both religious and civic authorities scold individuals from taking
justice in their own hands and thus encourage people stripped of their basic
rights to aggravate servitude by seeking institutional mitigation of justice.
In line with Hegel’s reference to deep history whereby he relativizes political
and cultural time[4], Al-Aswany
shows that institutional mitigation other than being essentially pointless,
given how justice is administered under dictatorships, remains
counterrevolutionary. Not only the police officer was not arrested in
preparation for the trial, but he also wasn’t even suspended from work or put
on probation during the months leading to the final sentence which
unsurprisingly finds him not guilty. For the benefits of theoretical clarity
again, Al-Aswany illustrates that Khaled’s killer’s show trial has to be read
specifically not as a dysfunctionality of the justice system either in Egypt or
elsewhere. Rather, it has to be read as part of an immanent logic of
dictatorships, and which Khaled’s father clearly registers, acts upon and
professionally executes.
Indeed,
that last scene can be disturbing because Al-Aswany masterfully positions it in
gothic aesthetics. In displaying the inevitability of violence, Al-Aswany
brings a satisfying closure from the perspective of the class struggle to that
other gothic scene that triggered the finale. In chapter forty, we read how
Madany in his own hands puts pieces of Khaled’s brain back in the hole caused
by the pistol shot. Khaled has been a principal organizer of a field hospital
near Tahrir Square charged of providing first aid to demonstrators. The officer
aims to kill because Khaled dares (note the word dare in
Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment) to reject the officer’s insult. It is a
scene that comes to shake passive readers from their reifying experience and
keep these audiences forever invested. That gothic structure generates a
movement within the consciousness of individuals of the middle class or who
identify as middle class. It is a movement that renders that consciousness
receptive (hospitable) to a prehistoric form and logic of justice, the
primitive law: an eye for eye! All else becomes synthesized by the same
invested audiences as alienation, domestication and obviously,
counterrevolution.
The way
Fanon theorizes revolutionary violence suggests how Al-Aswany cannot be
stigmatized by calls that organically propagate beyond the accepted perimeters
of passive resistance. By raising a credible threat over life, speaking and
executing a language that truly hurts the ruling classes, the revolutionary
ardour of Tahrir Square reaches the tipping point in the Hegelian system,
whereby quantity metamorphoses to quality. Violence, Fanon specifies, remains
purifying in the sense of ridding oneself of hesitations and doubts, thus
crystallizing practical predispositions to register false truths for what they
are. What else do today’s revolutionaries hope to gain?
[1] Walid
El Khachab, (2021) “Death of the Revolution, Death of the Event: Cinema and
Politics in the Aftermath of the Egyptian Spring.” Journal of the
African Literature Association, 15:3, p. 525.
[2] Simon
Weil, An Anthology. Penguin Modern Classics. 2005. p.105
[3] Karl
Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. The Merlin
Press (2015), p. 3
[4] Hegel, Philosophy
of Right.
