Economic Aspects of "Love"

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 06, 2012 4:28 pm


Avoidance of the history of Western malfeasance in the belt that runs from Morocco to Indonesia and of the history of dictatorships propped up with the support of the North Atlantic allows for a cavalier dismissal of rage as somehow rooted in an ageless culture rather than in the fabric of international relations. In August 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that an “arc of extremism” had taken hold in that belt, and that he wanted to husband “an alliance of moderation” to defeat it. That phrase “arc of extremism” appealed to President Bush, who reflected on 9/11 and the West’s wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and on the mythical sounding place called Terror, with a thicker brush. “Since the horror of 9/11, we’ve learned a great deal about the enemy,” he told the U.S. public. “And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations.” The “savage nations”, one can surmise, are the homelands on this “arc of extremism”. “The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation. This struggle has been called a clash of civilisations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilisation. We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations.”

Reflecting on Bush’s 2006 speech, Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (2012), notes, “What is striking about this characterisation of ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ is not only the degree of hyperbole but the fact that it finds resonance within the wider culture.” Media pundits in the U.S. casually call for the racial profiling of Arabs, Muslims and those who resemble “terrorists”. Hollywood produces a series of unreflective films that portray Arabs as terrorists, sheikhs or belly dancers. These representations are rooted in a long history of Orientalism, where disregard and fascination for “the Arab” is a routine feature. Out of this mediocre and Islamophobic history of representations of Islam and “the Arab” emerges the 14-minute trailer of Innocence of Muslims (or The Real Life of Muhammad), made by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in 2011 (and shown with Arabic subtitles on al-Nas, a Salafi satellite channel on September 9). At the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama denounced the “crude and disgusting video”, and pointed out that the “United States government had nothing to do with that video”. Nonetheless, it is also the case that a wellspring of Islamophobia did sanctify the images and themes that run right through the video.

As if to prove the case, in San Francisco and New York City, a group called Stop the Islamisation of America put up advertisements with the tag line, “In any war between the civilised man and the savage, support the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” The idea of civilised and savage is not novel to Pam Geller, who runs the group; they echo the 2006 speech by President Bush and the long history of colonial discourse. In August, the Arab American Institute released a report whose findings suggest that there is considerable support for the Geller position. Forty-one per cent of the U.S. residents asked by the survey had an unfavourable opinion of Muslims. Similar numbers expressed unfavourable opinions of Arabs, Muslim Americans and Arab Americans. The ground for this unfavourable attitude is not seeded by unfamiliarity.


— Vijay Prashad, Fear and hatred
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 06, 2012 4:42 pm

“Genocide is neither spontaneous nor random; however complex the historical and cultural conditions from which it emerges, it is always at root linked to perceptions of hostile difference. International response (or lack of it) to genocide is often deeply implicated in elaborate structures of racism. Because of Orientalism’s lens, telling us there is something fundamentally alien, interchangeable and indistinguishable about certain races, we become almost complacent in the face of mass killings of black- or brown-skinned people; after all, within the imperial or colonial mentality… Since Americans historically prize individuality and individualism, to emphasize the presumed collective nature of the enemy-Other, framing them repeatedly as interchangeable members of a dark multitude is intrinsically to devalue it. Being both dark and “billions,” as the “psychotic” Muslims are in Savages’s extended logic is enough to invite and justify the impulse to thin the herd.”

— Erin Steuter and Deborah Willis in 'At War With Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror'
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 06, 2012 8:14 pm

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... -romances/

RACIAL AND GENDER THEMES IN “SHEIKH ROMANCES”
by Gwen Sharp from Sociological Images, Nov 16, 2010
Cross-posted at Jezebel.


In the article “And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels,” Jessica Taylor discusses the “sheikh romance,” a type of romance novel that, Taylor argues, follows the following basic formula:

In an exotic land where it is rumoured that men still rule, a tall, dark and handsome sheikh meets a white woman who teaches him how to be ruled by love. (p. 1032)

Sheikh romances are generally set in fictional countries in the Middle East, with a male character described as a “sheikh,” “sultan,” or something along the lines of “king of the desert.” He is, of course, invariably rich and powerful. The female protagonist, on the other hand, is a White woman, usually from the U.S.

The topic is popular enough that Harlequin has a whole series, Desert Brides:

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Another popular option is the Sons of the Desert series:

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Taylor argues that these novels present a masculinized, exotic, and ultimately pre-modern Oriental Other that is contrasted with the modernized West.

Some examples:

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The blurb, from Amazon (elipses in original):

When Sheikh Khalid Fehr rescues innocent Olivia Morse from the hands of his country’s enemies, he guarantees her freedom by announcing she is his betrothed….Khalid has vouched for Liv with his honor… and this desert king is determined that his new wife will fulfill her marital duties, by his side as his regal queen…and as his captive virgin bride!


Image

Description:

Abbie Cavanaugh’s brother is in jail. Abbie can obtain his freedom—but only if she marries the Sheikh of Barakhara. The explosive passion between Prince Malik and Abbie could turn a marriage of convenience into one of Eastern promise. But neither Abbie nor Malik knows the other’s real identity. Can their marriage survive once the truth is revealed?

Image

Description:

After a whirlwind courtship, Sheikh Hakim bin Omar al Kadar proposes marriage. Shy, innocent Catherine Benning has already fallen head-over-heels in love and she accepts….

After their wedding day–and night–when the sheikh claims his virgin wife, Catherine and Hakim travel to his desert kingdom. There Catherine discovers that this is no love match for Hakim–he’s bought her!


For more examples, go to Amazon and search “sheikh romance.” Seriously, there are tons of them — Traded to the Sheikh, Stolen by the Sheikh, The Desert Prince’s Mistress, The Sheikh’s Virgin, Love-Slave to the Sheikh, The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride (notice the recurring economic transaction theme?), and my new personal favorite book title ever, Hired: The Sheikh’s Secretary Mistress, described thusly:

Sheikh Amir bin Faruq al Zorha lives in New York, but the desert is where his heart lies. Now it’s time for him to marry….Grace Brown, Amir’s plain but indispensable assistant, isn’t exactly queen material. No matter how tempted Amir is to take her innocence, she’s off-limits. Until he returns to his homeland, where the barbarian prince replaces the businessman—and resolves that Grace will be his!


Taylor argues that the themes of these books reflect concerns about gender relations while also setting up an East/West dichotomy in which Western (usually specifically U.S.) women tame the “barbarian” desires of non-Western men. The male love interests are too masculine for current U.S. cultural norms; they attempt to control women in an obvious manner, to force them into marriage, and/or to acquire them by purchase or trade.

But they are ultimately redeemable “barbarian princes.” On the cover, they’re darker than the (generally blond) woman, but only slightly so. They are usually described as having lived in the U.S. or Europe, often during college. They seek to “modernize” their countries, often signaled by their disinterest in or opposition to the harems still maintained by other men in their countries. Referring to harems clearly links this fictionalized Middle East to the past, while the individual hero instead chooses monogamy with one White woman, signaling his modernization.

A woman, and love, tame the dangerous but desirable hero. Interestingly, femininity here is presented as preferable not just for women, but for the male character as well, as a necessary element to balance his hypermasculinity:

…the man is brought to acknowledge the pre-eminence of love and the attractions of domesticity…the theme of category romance is female power…By getting the hero to give in and fall in love with her, and admit it, she brings him into the “feminine” world view…the heroine “civilizes” the Arab hero into a domestic love and he thus becomes an acceptable husband for a white girl. (p. 1046-47).

Ultimately, then, the sheikh romance presents a backward East, a state signaled largely by gender relations. There are two types of Middle Eastern men: those who are redeemable, who can be modernized, and those who can’t. And adoption of a certain ideal of monogamous romantic love, which renders the hero’s hypermasculinity exotic but no longer scary, provides the key to modernizing otherwise barbaric cultures.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 06, 2012 10:13 pm

Edward Said: Orientalism as a Tool of Colonialism





**


"Edward Said is the late world famous Palestinian intellectual and literature critic. He was a prominent member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years until he quietly stepped down in 1991. In 1948, Said and his family were dispossessed from Palestine and settled in Cairo. He came to the United States to attend college and lived in New York for many years. Because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and his membership in the Palestine National Council, Said was not allowed to visit Palestine until several years ago and passed away in 2003.

The late Edward Said was a professor of English and comparative literature, known as both a scholar of modern literature and theory as well as a scholar of Middle East politics. He also authored the groundbreaking book Orientalism, a seminal evaluation of Western misperceptions of the East (Muslim Orient), which set the stage for post-colonial studies. Other works include the Question of Palestine, Culture and Imperialism and the Politics of Dispossession."


http://electronicintifada.net/


Edward Said

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said

See also:


Edward Said on Culture and imperialism:

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid= ... 2259420708


Edward Said Lecture The Myth of 'The Clash of Civilizations'

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid= ... 4658699201
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 06, 2012 10:23 pm

excerpted from the book

The Iran-Contra Connection

Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era


by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott , Jane Hunter

South End Press, 1987


The Strategy of Tension: CAL, P-2, Drugs, and the Mafia

Reports linking WACL to drugs became particularly flagrant in the period 1976-80, as the rift between WACL and Carter's CIA widened, and as a new Argentine-dominated affiliate of WACL in Latin America (the Confederacion Anticomunista Latina, or CAL) plotted to extirpate radical Roman Catholic priests and prelates fostering liberation theology.

A high-point or low-point of the CAL plotting was reached in 1980, when Argentine officers, bankrolled by the lords of Bolivia's cocaine traffic, installed the Bolivian drug dictatorship of Luis Garcia Meza. Two of the Argentine officers involved turned out to be wanted Italian terrorists, Stefano delle Chiaie and Pierluigi Pagliai; together with the veteran Nazi fugitive and drug trafficker Klaus Barbie, the neo-fascists seized the radio station as a signal to launch the coup.

Barbie and delle Chiaie were both deeply involved in the CAL project to identify and exterminate leftists and radical priests. Through this project delle Chiaie had advised d'Aubuisson by 1979; and at the September 1980 meeting of CAL in Argentina, delle Chiaie and d'Aubuisson met and arranged for weapons and money to be sent to d'Aubuisson in El Salvador.

That 1980 CAL Conference was presided over by Argentine General Suarez Mason, today a fugitive wanted on charges arising from the Argentine junta's death squads. In attendance were Bolivia's dictator, Garcia Meza, wanted by U.S. drug authorities for his involvement in cocaine trafficking, and Argentine President Videla, today serving a life sentence for his policies of mass murder and torture. A featured speaker at the conference was Mario Sandoval Alarcon, who had brought his protege d'Aubuisson and arranged for him to be put in touch with delle Chiaie.

What was being brokered at the September 1980 CAL Conference was nothing less than an "Argentine solution" of death squad dictatorships from Buenos Aires to Guatemala City. The inspiration and direction of this scheme was however not just Argentine, but truly international, involving the Italo-Argentine secret Masonic Lodge P-2 (of which General Suarez Mason was a member), and possibly through them the financial manipulations by insiders of the Milan Banco Ambrosiano and Vatican Bank.

P-2 has come under considerable scrutiny in Italy, where it began, because of its on-going involvement in intelligence-tolerated coup attempts, bank manipulations, and terrorist bombings. All of this has contributed to a right-wing "strategy of tension," a tactic of developing a popular case for right-wing order, by fomenting violence and disruption, and blaming this when possible on the left. Stefano delle Chiaie was perhaps the master activist for P-2's strategy of tension, assisted by a group of French intelligence veterans working out of Portugal as the so-called press agency Aginter-Presse. The Aginter group had their own connections to WACL in Latin America before delle Chiaie did, especially to the Mexican chapter (the so-called "Tecos") and to Sandoval's WACL chapter in Guatemala.

According to the Italian Parliamentary Report on P-2:

P-2 contributed to the strategy of tension, that was pursued by right-wing extremist groups in Italy during those years when the purpose was to destabilize Italian politics, creating a situation that such groups might be able to exploit in their own interest to bring about an authoritarian solution to Italy's problems.

Del'e Chiaie was a principal organizer for three of the most famous of these incidents, the 1969 bomb in the crowded Piazza Fontana of Milan (16 deaths, 90 injuries), the 1970 coup attempt of Prince Valerio Borghese (a CIA client since 1945), and the Bologna station bombing of August 2, 1980 (85 deaths, 200 injuries). In December 1985 magistrates in Bologna issued 16 arrest warrants, including at least three to P-2 members, accusing members of the Italian intelligence service SISMI of first planning and then covering up the Bologna bombing. One of these 16 was P-2's leader Licio Gelli, who had spent most of the post-war years in Argentina.

A small group of anarchists, penetrated by delle Chiaie's man Mario Merlino, were blamed at first for the Piazza Fontana bombing, even though Sismi knew within six days that delle Chiaie was responsible, and Merlino had planted the bomb.

After 1974, when the right-wing "strategists of tension" lost critical support with the ending of the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish dictatorships, they appear to have looked increasingly for new friendly governments in Latin America. Delle Chiaie began to work for Chile's service DINA in 1975, the first contacts having been made through Aginter by Michael Townley, who would later murder Letelier with the help of CORU Cubans for DINA. (Delle Chiaie is said to have come from South America to Miami in 1982, with a Turkish leader of the fascist Grey Wolves who was a friend of the Pope's assassin Mehmet Agca.)

The P-2's support for Latin American terror seems to have been in part a matter of internal Roman Catholic politics: an attempt by one faction to use right-wing death squads to eliminate the Church's liberation theologians and moderate Christian Democrats. Both the contras and Mario Sandoval Alarcon were part of the anti-liberationist campaign: the contra radio maintained a steady propaganda campaign against the Maryknoll Sisters in Nicaragua; Lau of the contras murdered Archbishop Romero of El Salvador; and Lau's patron Sandoval, at the 11th WACL Conference in 1978, denounced the "intense Marxist penetration...acting within the highest echelons of the Catholic hierarchy." During the two years after the CAL adopted the Banzer Plan in 1978, "at least twenty-eight bishops, priests, and lay persons were killed in Latin America; most of their murders were attributed to government security forces or rightist death squads. That number multiplied after 1980 as civil war spread through Guatemala and El Salvador." We have already seen how Reagan's termination of the Carter "human rights" policies was followed by the decimation of the Guatemalan Christian Democrats.

The CAL/P-2 connection was and remains a drug connection as well. The terrorist delle Chiaie has been accused of ties to some of the French Connection heroin merchants who had relocated to Italy; while CAL Chairman Suarez Mason, according to the Italian magazine Panorama, became "one of Latin America's chief drug traffickers."

This Latin American WACL drug connection appears to have been originally put together by former Argentine Interior Minister Jose Lopez Rega, a P-2 member and Gelli intimate who was responsible for restoring Peron to power in 1973 and arranging for European experts in "dirty war" tactics to launch death squad tactics against the terrorist left. Lopez-Rega was later said to have been directly involved with other P-2 members in the Argentine-Paraguayan cocaine traffic, and to have used French members of the Ricord drug network as terrorists for his underground AAA (Alianza Argentina Anticomunista). Ex-CIA Cuban exile terrorists involved in the drug traffic also worked with the AAA, as well as for Somoza.

Paraguayan Intelligence Chief Pastor Coronel, a CAL participant and death squad co-ordinator, was also a smuggling partner of the Corsican drug kingpin in Latin America, Auguste Ricord, whose network trafficked with the Gambino Mafia family in New York. Michele Sindona, the author of the Ambrosiano-Vatican Bank connection to P-2, had his own connections to the Gambino family, which surfaced when in 1979 he used them to stage his own "abduction" to avoid a New York court appearance. According to Penny Lernoux, "the P-2 crowd obtained money from the kidnappings of well-to-do businessmen in Europe and from the drug traffic in South America. Sindona's bank laundered money from the notorious [Italian] Mafia kidnappers of Anonima Sequestri, who worked with ... Ordine Nuovo." Significantly, Mario Sandoval Alarcon has also been accused of resorting to the kidnapping of rich coffee-growers in Guatemala to get financing for his political faction. Since the fall of the Argentine junta and Suarez Mason in 1982-83, the AAA, abetted by delle Chiaie, has also taken to bank robberies and kidnapping.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 08, 2012 9:22 am

Image
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 08, 2012 12:12 pm

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 08, 2012 12:26 pm

Guy Debord calls the apple store

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2012 10:57 am

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... n-of-race/

OVERVIEW OF THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE
by Gwen Sharp, PhD

Image

Dalton Conley’s newest animated video provides an overview of the social construction of race: the categories we define as race aren’t based in biology, yet they’re incredibly important factors that influence our opportunities, constraints, and life outcomes.


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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2012 12:19 pm

http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema ... en-cameras

5 Broken Cameras

In 2005 the people of the Palestinian village of Bil’in, in the Occupied Territories, learned that the Israeli government’s Separation Wall would run close to their village, depriving them of much of their cultivated land – land which would then be taken over by Jewish settlers.

They resolved to protest by every non-violent means possible – and one of them, Emad Burnat, decided to document the protests with his newly acquired camera.

Over the next five years Burnat doggedly carries out his plan – despite being beaten up, wounded, jailed and having one camera after another smashed by soldiers. “I film,” he tells us, “to hold on to my life.”


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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2012 3:41 pm

Stopped-and-Frisked: 'For Being a F***king Mutt'



Exclusive audio obtained by The Nation of a stop-and-frisk carried out by the New York Police Department freshly reveals the discriminatory and unprofessional way in which this controversial policy is being implemented on the city’s streets.

In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.


Continues at: http://www.thenation.com/article/170413 ... mutt-video
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2012 10:08 pm

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.
More smiles? More money.
Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.
Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.”


— Sylvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework” (1975)
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 10, 2012 6:35 pm

We should rather talk about the rehabilitation of the concept of desire, and analyze how new desires enter the political sphere in these specific moments, during the emotional strikes that we call “human strikes.”

— Claire Fontaine. Human Strike Within the Field of the Libidinal Economy


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14025560/CF-LIBIDINAL-imp.pdf
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:14 am

Image

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, page 3
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:17 am

Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us. But those benefits have come with a price. In return for all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they must to keep patriarchy intact. Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong.

— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody
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