Friday, April 15, 2005
Class & Identity. posted by Richard Seymour
The Shiraz quaffing Larry Elliot has a message for New Labour :Instead of shaping capitalism to the needs of the people, Labour policy is now all about shaping the people to the needs of capitalism. The poor are told to eat healthier food, cut down on drinking, give up smoking, watch less TV, exercise more, take lessons in parenting. This may be done with the best of intentions; it may be in society's best interests; it may, indeed, be the best that modern politics can provide. But the evidence suggests that those on the receiving end don't feel grateful. They feel patronised and despised.
Meanwhile, an excellent article in Al-Ahram by an Iraqi human rights activist discusses the way the occupiers of Iraq have promoted sectarianism :
Political sectarianism existed in Iraq since the establishment of the modern state in 1921. After all, to ruling authorities sectarian and ethnic divisions were a useful instrument for consolidating and perpetuating their control. The device was given legal expression in the Nationality Law 42 of 1924, which came into effect even before the promulgation of Iraq's first Constitution, or basic law, in 1925, in the Nationality Law 43 of 1963 and then in the discriminatory decrees issued by the Revolutionary Command Council from 1968 onwards. The most salient repercussions of these laws and decrees was the expulsion of some half a million Iraqis, a phenomenon which reached its peak at the outset of the Iraq-Iran war and the RCC Decree 666 of 7 May 1980. Bremer however elevated sectarianism to an official denominational ordering of society, which is perhaps more potentially dangerous or at best a sanctification of the ugly side of the face of sectarianism.
Sectarian and ethnic tensions mounted considerably under Bremer's rule. Across the religious Shia-Sunni, Kurdish-Turkoman, Arab-Kurdish- Christian-Chaldean divides, barricades have been erected. One is reminded of the observation of the eminent Iraqi sociologist, the late Ali Al-Wardi, who described this phenomenon as sectarianism without religion. What he meant was that the truly pious individual cannot be sectarian because Islam like other religions abhors sectarianism. The existence of diverse sects and denominations is a healthy phenomenon so long as it is a manifestation of constructive plurality and diversity rather than narrow partisanship and mutual hatred.