Month: April 2008

Iran Accuses US of Invading Iraq; US Issues Denial

Iran today accused the US of invading Iraq over 5 years ago in 2003, and claims that the US has been “deliberately meddling” ever since by “conquering Iraq, by causing and creating wanton bombing and slaughter and refugee flight” in that country, as well as in Afghanistan. Iran, however, a leading oil exporter, did put in a good word for the great increase in oil price that the purported US invasion has created and sustained.

Through its chief spokesman Stan D. Garde, the US denied that it “invaded Iraq in any traditional sense of the word” but instead has made more of a “preventive visit” only to find itself “invited to build a few bases and stay on” by the Green Zone Iraqi government that the US defends from the vast majority of the rest of the country still known as Iraq. As for any refugee flight, reportedly involving millions of Iraqis, the US spokesman acknowledges that there has been some “limited well-advised and optional relocation of Iraqis but that Iraq is a more lean and harmonious nation today because of it.”

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Art and War

Robert Fisk:

I was in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron once, in 2001, and the Palestinians had lynched three supposed collaborators. And they were hanging so terribly, almost naked, on the electricity pylons out of town, that I could not write in my notebook. Instead, I drew pictures of their bodies hanging from the pylons. Young boys – Palestinian boys – were stubbing out cigarettes on their near-naked bodies and they reminded me of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and pain and forgiveness, and so all I could do was draw. I still have the pictures. They are ridiculous, stupid, the work of a reporter who suddenly couldn’t bring himself to write the details on the page.

But I understand Hoyland’s picture, even if it is not my picture. After I saw the oil fires burning in Kuwait in 1991, an Irish artist painted Fisk’s Fires – a title I could have done without – in which she very accurately portrayed the bleached desert with the rich, thick, chocolate-tasting oil we tasted in the aftermath of the war. Sometimes, I wish these painters were with us when we saw the war with our own eyes – and which they could then see with theirs. …

Nadine Gordimer, Palestine, Israel

Via ZNet

Nadine Gordimer on her decision to participate in “Israel at 60 Celebrations”

Dr. Haidar Eid:

Dear Ms. Gordimer,

I am a Palestinian lecturer in Cultural Studies living in Gaza. I happen to also have South African citizenship as a result of my marriage to a citizen of that beloved country. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, the city in which I earned my Ph.D and lectured at both traditionally black and white universities. At Vista in Soweto, I taught your anti-apartheid novels My Son’s Story, July’s People and The Late Bourgeois World. I have been teaching the same novels, in addition to The Pick Up and Selected Stories, to my Palestinian students in Gaza at Al-Aqsa University. This course is called “Resistance, Anti-Racism and Xenophobia”. I deliberately chose to teach your novels because, as an anti-apartheid writer, you defied racial stereotypes by calling for resistance against all forms of oppression, be they racial or religious. Your support of sanctions against apartheid South Africa has, to say the least, impressed my Gazan students.

 

The news of your conscious decision to take part in the “Israel at 60” celebrations has reached us, students and citizens of Gaza, as both a painful surprise, and a glaring example of a hypocritical intellectual double standard. My students, psychologically and emotionally traumatized and already showing early signs of malnutrition as a result of the genocidal policy of the country whose birth you intend celebrating, demand an explanation.
 

Continue reading Nadine Gordimer, Palestine, Israel

Painting and War

Mark Vallen:

The April 2008 edition of Modern Painters: The International Contemporary Art Magazine, is devoted to “the politically driven art made in response to war and its critical reception.” An introductory statement from the magazine’s Assistant Editor, Quinn Latimer, sums up the profusely illustrated April edition thusly: “Each month, with some discomfiture, we publish art criticism that rarely touches on the Iraq war. But the fifth anniversary of the American invasion compelled us to unambiguously address the conflict. …

Doomsday Men

PD Smith:

The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems. …

Footnotes to the Conquest: Iraq War Novels and Movies

The media is full of articles stating that Iraq war movies and films (the fiction features) have not done well at the box office, but compared to the relative lack of, say, Hurricane Katrina movies, or, say, the ongoing national slaughter of the impoverished by the impoverishers movies, the growing numbers of Iraq war movies, by their very existence alone, are doing extremely well.

Far more such movies have been made now than were remotely ever made about the Vietnam war at a comparable time. And far more people see most any of these movies than see most any such documentary. But it’s no cause for celebration, far from it, because these movies are very careful not to be too “antiwar,” too revealing of the basic illegality and immorality of the US conquest of Iraq.

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Book Club Activism

Debra Linn:

Edwidge Danticat’s family memoir Brother, I’m Dying riled us up. Outraged us, actually. We were incensed by the treatment her uncle received when he arrived in Miami from full-on upheaval in Haiti. Our book club had received the call to action, our chance to start living up to our name, Page Against the Machine, an opportunity for book club activism.

Book club activism sounds high-minded and formal, but really, just about any book can spur your club to action. It rises organically from your connection to the book. What Is the What by Dave Eggers leads to activism about Sudan. Water for Elephants to the Humane Society or PETA, perhaps. …

Fiction and the Left

On the left in North America, the novel kind of died or was killed a long time ago, if nowhere else. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was not only first published in serial form in a left periodical, his research for the novel was funded by it – by the socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. I’m aware of no left news periodicals that are regularly running partisan liberatory fiction. Liberation Lit is one of the few left journals of any type that runs much progressive partisan fiction, and that consciously seeks it out.

Left periodicals might find it ever more to their benefit to run Lib Lit type fiction because, at least compared to nonfiction, it reads better in print than online. Moreover, a lot of nonfiction is actually more useful online than in print, by far; whereas, probably the opposite is true for fiction, with the exception of microfiction. Plus, running liberatory fiction would give left news outlets a comparative advantage over the many news outlets that don’t run any fiction at all, or very little.

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Remedial Crucifixion

Out back is where we crucify the students. The loyal-consumers-in-training, I mean. The lcit.

Actually, out back is mainly where we crucified the lcit – those who have most seriously erred – but now, times being what they are, we crucify them all over the Terminal and Terminal grounds.

There seems to be an inevitable rhythm to the crucifixions. This stern punishment arises from incidents that arrive in clusters around the holidays, near the beginnings and endings of the Terminal year, and semesters, and months, and weeks. Also, the beginnings and endings of days, classes, and exam periods are particularly fraught with tension and volatility. Not to mention to different degrees every moment in between. We find remedial crucifixion necessary for lcit crimes deemed especially heinous, such as duct-taping over forehead ID bar codes and other subversive behavior, like excessive cooperation and socializing.

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Interview with Eduardo Galeano – by Andre Vltchek

 

at Café Brazilero, in historic center city Montevideo

Q: Eduardo Galeano, after so many years are the veins of Latin America still open?

A: Yes; obviously yes. I think they are. Not long ago I met count Dracula in Buenos Aires. He was looking for an Argentinean psychoanalyst. Argentina produces many psychoanalysts. Dracula was told by someone that he can still be cured by an Argentinean psychoanalyst. I found count Dracula in a terrible state; really depressed, thin, terrible…

Continue reading Interview with Eduardo Galeano – by Andre Vltchek

Art Against War

Mark Vallen reports:

LA vs. War promises to be one of the largest antiwar cultural happenings in the recent history of Los Angeles. Organized by the activist artists of Yo!, the same people who put together the Yo! What Happened to Peace? international touring peace poster exhibit, the LA vs. War extravaganza is scheduled to run April 10 – 13, 2008, at The Firehouse art space in downtown Los Angeles. In the words of the organizers, the show will be “an unprecedented gathering of artists united to deliver a message of peace, and offering resistance and opposition to war and violence.”

Tim Robbins 1984 Play

Tim Robbins’ reimagining of Orwell’s ‘1984’ resonates in 2008 by James D. Watts Jr. –

“It’s one of those books you think you know well — until you sit down and read it,” said Tim Robbins, the Academy Award-winning actor and director who founded The Actors’ Gang. “And then you realize just how prescient George Orwell was, and how incredibly relevant this book is today.”

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Edwidge Danticat on Art and Injustice

Haitian repression inspires Danticat

by Reilly Kiernan, The Daily Princetonian

An immigrant author must be brave enough to “create dangerously,” said Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who delivered the second annual Toni Morrison Lecture last night in Richardson Auditorium and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Danticat discussed how dealing with injustice in her native Haiti inspired her writing and cultivated her belief in the importance of art in coping with oppression and conflict.

Continue reading Edwidge Danticat on Art and Injustice