Author Archives: Editors

Where were the protesters when the Rohingya were being murdered? By Kenan Malik

Posted on by
Reply

Myanmar’s coup has brought thousands on to the streets, but in 2017 they were empty.

For almost three weeks there have been mass protests on the streets of Myanmar. On 1 February, the Tatmadaw, or military, moved against the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, claiming fraud in last November’s elections, which her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), comprehensively won.

Since then, civil servants and teachers, bus drivers and garment workers have taken to the streets. Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, was brought to a standstill by a “broken-down” rally, where drivers left their cars parked across the roads, with bonnets open. There are even stories of police having joined in.

The nationwide defiance of the military coup has been courageous and impressive, and echoes similar protests in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere. But, as welcome and important as these demonstrations are, they also lead to a difficult and uncomfortable question. Where was all the marching and shouting and defiance over the past four years as the Tatmadaw organised a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people, razing their villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh?

The Rohingya, Muslims who live mostly in the north-west state of Rakhine, bordering Bangladesh, are the most persecuted of Myanmar’s many ethnic groups. Though Rohingya have lived in Rakhine for generations, they are treated, officially and unofficially, as foreigners. The authorities refer to them as “Bengalis”, and the 2014 census refused to include Rohingya as an ethnic category.

The military junta that came to power in Myanmar in 1962 (or Burma as it was then) fomented hatred against the Rohingya as a means of cementing support. The latest and most vicious drive began in 2017. Under the pretext of a campaign against “terrorists”, the army implemented a programme of ethnic cleansing, which many deem as possessing “genocidal intent”, a clampdown as brutal as China’s suppression of the Uighurs.

Full article

posted by f. sheikh

The Self as Cipher: Salman Toor’s Narrative Paintings

Posted on by
Reply
A painting of a bar lit in green light filled with people dancing, kissing, checking their phones, and drinking.
On a wall in Salman Toor’s studio hangs an unfinished painting that the artist made when he was feeling suddenly constricted in his practice. In a move to get more experimental and, in his words, “find some language that would feel consistent and flow out naturally,” he picked up a small panel and without any premeditation, painted a scene that felt wholly familiar.1In it, two men—one resembling Toor himself—stand across from a woman in uniform, clearly an airport customs and border patrol agent. On a table between them rests the agent’s smartphone and a dark green passport, her hand lingering close to the latter.
This was the first time Toor painted a scene so direct and personal. Previously, his work had consisted of larger figurative paintings set in South Asia and created in the style of European Old Masters; expressionistic paintings of sprawling contemporary rooftop parties; and small portraits scattered with speech bubbles and automatic writing in Urdu script. Toor’s art education was in academic painting. He spent years studiously poring over and copying the works of Rococo, Baroque, and Neoclassical-era artists like Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, incorporating their styles into his own original compositions. Over the course of his growing up in Lahore, Pakistan—prior to moving to the United States to earn his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University (2006) and his MFA at Pratt Institute (2009)—he became deeply knowledgeable about the works of modern Pakistani and Indian painters such as Colin David, Bhupen Khakhar, and Amrita Sher-Gil. Much of his early source material also came from Pakistani advertisements. While those earlier works blended his many global aesthetic references, they did not intimately echo his own experience as a queer Brown man living between the United States and South Asia.

Read full articlehttps://whitney.org/essays/salman-toor-self-as-cipher

posted by f.sheikh

Gulf slave society-By Bernard Freamon

Posted on by
1

The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies.

The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states ­– Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait ­– grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region. Thereafter, the family-run polities that took control of these city-states began to attract huge amounts of financial capital from all over the world. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, has been described as ‘the richest city in the world’, with wealth rivalling that seen in Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Like those cities, Abu Dhabi is swimming in over-the-top affluence. According to a 2007 report in Fortune magazine, Abu Dhabi’s 420,000 citizens, who ‘sit on one-tenth of the planet’s oil and have almost $1 trillion invested abroad, are worth about $17 million apiece’.

The Persian Gulf has a venerable history, stretching back to ancient times. It has always been a cosmopolitan and diverse centre of wealth and commerce. For nearly 1,000 years, Dilmun, a Bronze Age Arabian polity based in what is today Bahrain, controlled the trading routes between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus river valley. During the Abbasid caliphate, a 500-year-long Islamic empire based in Baghdad, mercantile entities in Basra and al-Ubulla, at the head of the Gulf, dominated trade and commercial links with East Africa, Egypt, India, Southeast Asia and China. One could buy anything in this trade, including giraffes, elephants, precious pearls, silk, spices, gemstones and very expensive Chinese porcelain. Omani Arabs, who periodically controlled the maritime entrance to the Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz, were known as the ‘Bedouins of the Sea’. They came to control the trading routes with East Africa, transporting spices, precious stones and many other luxury commodities.

Slavery and slave trading formed a major part of this commercial history, particularly after the advent of Islam. Africans, Baluchis, Iranians, Indians, Bangladeshis, Southeast Asians and others from the Indian Ocean littoral were steadily and involuntarily transported into the Gulf in increasingly large numbers, for work as domestic servants, date harvesters, seamen, stone masons, pearl divers, concubines, guards, agricultural workers, labourers, and caretakers of livestock. Historians have noted that there was a great upsurge of slave trading into the region in the 18th and 19th centuries, during the heyday of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Many Persian Gulf families became very wealthy as a result of this upsurge. This is the backdrop for what turns out to be a very ugly and sad aspect of the spectacular rise of contemporary social orders in the six Gulf city-states. Each is an example, and perhaps the only examples existing in the world today, of what the sociologist Moses Finley (1912-86) called a ‘genuine slave society’.

Finley is one of the most important scholars of slavery. His book Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980) has had a profound effect on how scholars across the social sciences understand and study slavery. He argued that the slave, in contrast with the ordinary labourer, is an income-producing commodity – a species of property to be bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, gifted and even destroyed, like other commodities – and this special status permitted exploitation of the slave in ways that were unique and central features of many societies. He divided these societies into two categories: those societies that could be described as ‘societies with slaves’ and those that he described as ‘genuine slave societies’, that is, those where slavery was an essential aspect of the society’s self-definition. The genuine slave society can’t function without the presence and work of its slaves. Some argue that the core definition of slavery has changed in contemporary sociological theory and practice since Finley’s time. This change recognises a phenomenon commonly described as ‘modern slavery’. I disagree. Applying Finley’s model to contemporary Persian Gulf societies, I argue that this change, indeed expansion, in the definition of slavery makes no difference in the analysis, and might make it even easier to apply the model to the Persian Gulf city-states. They are just as much genuine slave societies, using Finley’s analysis, as were the ancient societies he described.

Full article

Posted by f.sheikh

Can Poverty Be Eradicated

Posted on by
2

Can Poverty Be Eradicated?

By:  Shoeb Amin

The opinions expressed in this submission are those of the author and do not reflect those of the TF and its editorial board

Recently China announced it has eradicated “extreme poverty” in its country one month ahead of its stated goal. If everything that comes out of Xi Jinping’s propaganda machine is to be believed- I usually take it with a whole can of salt – that is a miraculous achievement .

 But before we look at the veracity of China’s claim and look at how those goals were achieved we need some definitions of the word poverty. Extreme or absolute poverty is defined globally by the World Bank as an income of $1.90 per family per day. China decided it will have its own definition of extreme poverty – at 1.52/day/family  instead of the globally recognized 1.90/day/family (I told you) and declared it had eradicated extreme poverty. (See the Breitbart link below). It still is not a small achievement … but China did so by spending billions and  through forced relocation and forced labor (as reported in the LA times link below).

The  next category is “relative poverty” which the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development defines as an income less than half of the median income of all the country’s citizens. Thus the relative poverty level for India might be very different from that of Finland. The rates are in the following link. But instead of using these academic definitions I will refer to poverty, in my opinions below, to mean significant lack of the most basic necessities such as food, shelter, clothing and safety.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-rate-by-country
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/11/24/china-claims-it-has-eliminated-poverty-nationwide/
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-27/china-2020-poverty-eradication-dream

Some of the tactics China used to “eradicate its own definition of extreme poverty” would be considered human rights violations  in most other countries and cannot be applied everywhere. Since most of the world cannot adopt the Chinese formula what else can the rest of the world do? Solving any problem requires understanding the causes of the problem. Causes of poverty are complex and sometimes the causes and their effects form a vicious circle in the sense that one aggravates the other. According to UKEssaya the most common cause of poverty is hunger; if you are undernourished ,you don’t have the mental or physical energy to strive out of poverty. But hunger is also the effect of poverty so some people find themselves in a trap that they can never come out of.

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/economics/causes-and-effects-of-poverty-economics-essay.php

Christopher Sarlo of the Fraser Institute divides the the causes in 3 broad categories; “bad luck”, “bad choices” and enablement. Bad luck causes are those over which you have no control so if you are born as an untouchable in India or a Uyghur in China; or born with major physical and mental disabilities or born in a country  which is grossly mismanaged chances are you’ll end up in poverty. Personally I think being intellectually challenged  is the most common cause of poverty; it not only falls in the bad luck category (you can’t control the genes your parents give you) but also to a large extent in the bad choices category. The “bad choices” category includes dropping out of school, early child bearing, having children out of a committed relationship, drug use etc. Sarlo’s third category is “enablement” ; he believes by the govt. doling out welfare checks to the poor it actually perpetuates poverty.

Some people fall into poverty from”temporary” reasons like major natural disasters e.g. earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, war etc.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/causes-of-poverty

Now that we know all the causes of poverty can we eliminate them all and end poverty and hunger forever? I can categorically say NO, never. My view is not from pessimism, cynicism or negativism; it is just from realism that most of us do not want to accept.  Poverty has been with us since the time of the Pharaohs or even before that. It existed even before money was invented, when the rich had 100 sheep and the poor had one or none. It existed during all the great empires. It existed before capitalism and the industrial revolutions ( which some blame for poverty) came into being. Well meaning activists and philanthropists have tried for decades, if not centuries, to eradicate it and poverty still survives. I think wealth distribution, like our height and weight and other characteristics, will always vary on a bell shaped curve; there will always be folks below the 5th percentile (2 standard deviations below mean).There will always be people born with bad luck factors described above; always be people who make bad choices in life and there will always be a few – not all – people who, because of receiving their government’s financial assistance get trapped in that state or prefer to stay there. And there will always be populations living under Mugabe-like governments. You cannot make all those causes go away.

So am I saying helping the poor is a futile exercise? Not at all. Helping those who have fallen into poverty because of “temporary” causes listed above has very good results. Studies have shown that a majority of those so affected get back on their feet and get close to their previous financial state.Helping the chronically poor – certainly the ones who fall into the bad luck category – to alleviate their plight is laudable but that is different from the lofty but impossible goal of attempting to eradicate poverty and hunger. You can never make all the causes of poverty go away concurrently.  Even some Scandinavian countries, with all their high taxes and very generous socialistic policies have not been able to eradicate poverty. Refer to the second chart in the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

I wish I had a more positive opinion on this subject and I certainly wish I could  be proven wrong.