April 20, 2005

• Why would everything be rosy? One bunch of kleptocrats has replaced another bunch. If you're still poor and being told what to do everyday, it's probably little consolation that Saddam has gone.
• The incredibly rad Raed was briefly seen around these parts.
• I didn't find her April 10th post distressing in the sense which would be "disturbing" to an "American," I found it to be brutally honest and poignant. The sad and unfortunate reality is that people living in Iraq continue to be exploited by those greedy fat pig noses that never get enough to grovel...
• sugarmilktea - yes, that's what I intended to point out (up to the "greedy fat pig noses" part.) I'd hoped we could cut the hyperbole out and discuss the emotions of the differing sectors of the Iragi bloggers in some sort of meaningful way. Guess not. And, dj,Faisa isn't poor (she's an engineer who has the resources to have moved to Jordan, having,apparently given up her business in Baghdad to work on women's issues in Iraq from afar) and probably none of the other Iraqi blogger are. There were some elements in her post that seems anti-Kurd, but I may be reading it from a PC USain prospective. The closest to a poor Iraqi that I've found on the internet is this recently graduated engineer who's working on rebuilding the infrastrcture. His English is dicey, but he seems really earnest. Well, guess I should have been more clear. The divergence on views among the bloggers is interesting, especially since we USains have the opportunity to actually see what people we've (shamefully, in my opinion) invaded are thinking. If you read the archives on some of the links (which many of you may have when they were new) you'll find folks like this guy, whose story is as poingnant as Faisa's.
• I think this is a great post path, and do agree with you. My present work exposes me to material relating directly to Iraq, and is not by any means common knowledge. My greedy fat pig noses comment is the closest I can come to surmise the reality of what's happened, based on the information I have seen with my own eyes... as juvenile as it may sound
• Thanks for this post; it's good to get this perspective. But we should avoid the tendency to try to decide whether Faiza (or anyone else) is "right" or "wrong" and approve or dimiss her accordingly. I imagine her feelings of helplessness and rage are widely shared, and we need to understand them, whatever we think of the American invasion. (I was and am against it.) But she's full of nationalistic, ahistorical attitudes: I noticed that the tables in the conference were almost divided, on some tables sat Kurdish women, in their folklore dresses, and on some other tables sat the Arabs, from Baghdad, the south, and the Middle-region. This was the first time I see the Iraqis like this…. Thanks to America….for this is how she wants us to be quarreling, scattered, and far away from each other. This is just ridiculous. The Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites have been divided and quarreling as long as they've been in the region, and the people who were there before quarreled too -- read about the Assyrians vs the Babylonians. To quarrel is the human lot. But this kind of rhetoric is typical of top-dog people who have suddenly been demoted; you can hear it from post-breakup Serbs ("Everybody loved us when we ruled Yugoslavia, and now they hate us, thanks to those meddling Americans!") and Russians ("OK, there were problems in the USSR, but the Russians were the most oppressed of all!"). Top dogs are always convinced they're ruling in the best interests of all parties; that everyone really loves and appreciates them, though never enough; and that they themselves are bearing the greatest burden. Then when the peasants come with pitchforks, the slaves revolt, the oppressed peoples rise up, they look around, blinking in bewilderment, and try to find someone to blame. The Jews used to be an ever-popular choice; now it's the Americans. When the American Empire collapses and the US becomes a wretched, debt-ridden, pathetic client state (I'm expecting China and India to be the top dogs in a few decades), you'll hear the same sort of whining from Americans. "They all watched our movies and ate our Big Macs, everybody loved us... what happened??" I admit I'm curious about who will get blamed, but I hope I'm not around to find out.
• Ah, hat, I'm with you. Been clear for a sadly long time, two huge eneomies of humanity are ignorance and disease. And the latter will slay far more than all the wars and squabbling are likely to do, if past history's a guide. Seems it's easier for people to look at the smaller issues and get all worked up over them rather than come to terms with the inadequacies of our own nature and attempt to remedy them. And yet medicine progresses. Knowledge increases. So it's not hopeless, just SLOW. Rather be alive now than a hundred years ago, before antibiotics existed, or before rabies could be controlled, me. Simply getting people to wash their hands often is a great accomplishment, but it doesn't make the headlines. Separating the outhouse/sewerage from the drinking water, ditto. But these things are so often what improves quality of human existence, and not the potoful nonsense in the headlines.
• - pitiful nonsense *sigh*
• It was interesting to read her perspective on something that gets fed to us everyday. We are, essentially (and I mean this in the most general sense), oblivious to this kind of rhetoric. We've heard it for so long from continuously expanding sources that we don't really acknowledge the blatant hypocracy. It makes me sick to my stomach to read something like that. Why? Well, it is shameful. I don't want to be represented by people who can look these Iraqi's in the face and force-feed their sales pitch while maintaining a false naivete in the face of incredulity. We continue to look like fools, yet fools who seem to be getting away with just about anything. I dread the day we pay the price. That being said, I agree with Hat. There is definitely an elitist tone to what she says. Yet, good for her for being proactive in her world and speaking up. I think it is ultimately futile, however. The world is changing in ways that we don't want and we all seem incapable of doing anything about it. /momentarily depressed but not losing hope.....
• I haven't really read Faisa's blog much before now. Her March 6 entry comments on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, a book she purchased while visiting Dubai: "...well, that really amazed me! As if I stood before it, while it was talking about my experience in life...I was amazed at his expressions, and his intelligence, as he said that his relation with his wife taught him, opening all these secrets to him. I wished all men were like him ….. had the same intelligence, understanding, and feelings." Also, her comments about a conference speaker talking about his brother being executed by Saddam as the same old boring speech saddened me a little, because I wondered if the attitude stemmed partly from Saddam being gone but the loss of life continuing to happen, one way or another. (I would assume that this kind of an attitude doesn't stem from lack of personal loss, as she suggests that all Iraqis lost relatives to Saddam, but I haven't really read her journal extensively enough to know.)
• I've heard the same kind of attitude from Russians -- "yes, yes, everybody lost relatives to the Gulag, how boring" -- I think it may be a survival mechanism for those who have been forced to live in an essentially unlivable situation. bees: I like "potoful"!
• I just hope everything works out in the future. I am resigned to the thought that even given the egalitarian nature of the internet, we still are fed even more breathless spin.
• I suppose I should have added that when I say "we" and "us" I mean Americans. I hope I didn't come off sounding like "We" are the only ones to be considered (such an American thing to do;/).
• Path, it's pretty obvious that someone invited to a high-level pro-govt. conference, with relatives who are pharmacists and who is going to do a postgraduate degree at university isn't poor. My comment was directed towards why anyone would think that life for people anywhere in the Middle East would be rosy. For example, much like Colombia, the labour movement in Iraq has been routinely harassed by all sorts of people. We regularly get documentaries here about life around the world that are shown on at least two of our five main tv national tv channels. Only the other day there was a great documentary that followed the lives of two Iranian prostitutes and the people that they lived with. The New Internationalist, a magazine that I subscribe to, also regularly presents the perspectives of poor and working class people from around the globe. The last issue featured street kids. I find that in many media, the perspectives that we are given are those of middle-class professionals. They are good material for mainstream journalists - articulate, provide a variety of opinion and it promotes the idea that everything is a-ok with 'our' way of doing things.
• You damn bolshie!
• nah, the bolshies would have had me up against the wall as a bourgeois counterrevolutionary because I didn't support good old Lev Bronsteins idea that the state = the workers and can thus do whatever it likes to the workers
• I'm not interested in precision, I'm interested in baseless hot-button smears!
• And yet medicine progresses. I'll bite. How does medicine progess?
• Wolof, I have it on good authority that you also enjoy hot-buttered smears.
• good old Lev Bronstein You know what they say: the Trotskys make the revolutions, the Bronsteins pay the bill.
• bees: I like "potoful" <3s languagehat