 | | Most accounts of the post-election protests in Iran see them as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. In fact, Slavoj Zizek writes in the current issue of the LRB, they were a 'genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution', a 'great emancipatory event'. If we in the West fail to recognise them as such, then we 'will have entered a postdemocratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads'.
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Zizek denounces Ahmadinejad as a 'corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi'. The comparison isn't as far-fetched as it may seem. Both leaders 'are part of the same global process'. 'The virus of authoritarian capitalism,' Zizek writes, 'is slowly but surely spreading around the globe.' He compares an ordinary citizen in a democracy to a king in a constitutional monarchy, whose power is only nominal. '"Free elections" involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.' Read more
In Pakistan last month, Tariq Ali was told by a volunteer who worked in a refugee camp near Mardan that 'the overwhelming bulk of refugees blame the United States and the army for their plight, not the "terrorists" in their various guises.' And as Ali points out, 'this is now Obama's war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan.'
Ali left 'Fortress Islamabad' just before a party thrown by the American ambassador on 2 July. 'Probably the most heavily guarded event in the global social calendar, this is the modern equivalent of the viceroy's garden parties in old New Delhi.' The ambassador, Anne Patterson, earlier this year praised Pakistan's president to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. Zardari 'does everything we ask', she said. He's not so popular among his own people. There are even rumours linking Zardari to the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, though Ali finds them implausible. Washington meanwhile blames Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. 'The TTP,' Ali writes, 'is a product of the recent Afghan wars, Russian, indigenous and American, its thinking a poisonous combination of traditional tribal patriarchy and Wahhabi prescriptions . . . Capturing and killing its leaders may make people feel better, but it will solve very little.' Read more
When most people think of Marcus Aurelius, they probably think of the ageing emperor in Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator. Richard Harris's portrayal more or less conforms to the standard modern image of the philosopher-emperor, 'conquering the Germans (or persecuting the Christians) by day', as Mary Beard puts it, 'while puzzling over ethical conundrums by night'. This image is based on the 'personal, disconnected, philosophical musings' now known as the Meditations, though no one has any idea what the work was originally called, 'or if, indeed, it was ever intended by its author to be the kind of thing that would have a title'.
What's more, 'if a text like this were to be discovered today in the sands of Egypt,' Beard says, 'not tied to the name of an emperor, we would almost certainly interpret it as a set of fairly routine philosophical exercises.' When Frank McLynn, the author of a speculative new biography of the emperor, 'chooses (as many have before him) to scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus' inner conflicts, he might as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of a modern philosophy undergraduate.' Read more
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