:: Friday, February 21, 2003 ::

Iraq, India, and Pakistan:

As Pakistan will be serving as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the next two years, it is faced with some difficult choices in the upcoming/ongoing war in Iraq. If Pakistan changes its mind and decides to support the US, it may further increase tension with India and isolate Pakistan from the Muslim world. Not to mention, the reaction that a pro-US policy against Iraq might have within Pakistan. Finally, if the generally pro-American BJP (at least in contrast to several previous regimes) continues to condemn the US, this may have long term consequences for US-India relations which had been warming since the Clinton administration. The Asia Times has an excellent article by Praful Bidwai that is worth reading as an introduction to this issue.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:41 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some Factoids from the Census:

INDIAN AMERICAN POPULATION

The Indian American population stands at 1,678,765 as of the 2000 Census. This represents a 106% increase over the 1990 Census figures. The source of all the data below is from the United States Census.

QUICK FACTS FROM THE 2000 UNITED STATES CENSUS:

The overall growth rate for Indian Americans from 1990-2000 was 105.87% the largest growth in the Asian American community, the average annual growth rate was 7.6%
Indian Americans represent .6 percent of the United States population with 1,678,765
Asian Americans constitute 3.6 percent of the United States population, with 10,242,998
Indian Americans comprise 16.4% of the Asian American community
Indian Americans are the 3rd largest constituency in the Asian American community behind the Chinese American community, and the Filipino American community
The Asian American community overall grew at a rate of 48.26% from 1990-2000
The total United States population is 281,421,906

:: Vikash Yadav 10:49 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Foucault's Panopticon, Liberalism and the Problem of Freedom:

I think Vikash’s thought provoking post below on the Domestic Security Act of 2003 raises some crucial and troubling concerns with regards to the relationship between power and freedom in our supposedly liberal democratic polities. I agree completely about the invasiveness of daily life by various elements of surveillance being the first step in accustoming people to a more generalised regime where such transgressions of privacy occur on a regular basis. I remember a few years back when CCTV started to be inducted into most urban hotspots within the UK as a means of combating crime; some liberal commentators raised the spectre of the state playing Big Brother and the possible uses and ramifications that this might have on the ability to escape such a regulatory gaze of the state for private citizens. At the time they were almost universally ignored as “do-good agitators” stirring up a lot of fuss over a minor issue and most people were much more tolerant of such surveillance/regulation. Yet as Vikash points out this is just the first step in a much more dubious road of increasing State control and battles which could have been fought over apparently minor infractions of civil liberties were ceded without contestation laying the ground for more intrusion further along the line in a rather insidious manner. Perhaps the failure is one of Liberalism as Vikash suggests and the solution for those on this side of the political spectrum would be to move from classical-based conceptions of liberalism towards a more radical notion of Libertarianism which while sharing some key liberal values would be much fiercer in defending what would be regarded as key or essential liberties despite the high cost involved. It was Benjamin Franklin, I think, who said that the People who would give up a little bit of their Liberty for the promise of more Security in the Future deserved neither. This is a lesson that most liberals have seemed to have forgotten.

Yet I am more troubled with certain antagonisms that debates over Civil Liberties have revealed over the last year, which lead me to question and probe further this uneasy dichotomy between the liberal state and the authoritarian foundations upon which it rests. I am not so sure that it is necessarily a failure of developing a new technology of governance or of Political Science theory as such but rather one that reveals some more disturbing fault lines within this dilemma:

1) It never ceases to surprise me in many debates both on the Internet and in public forums as well as in private; just how eager many people who like to think of themselves as adherent and supporters of Liberal Democracy if not Liberalism or Progressive politics; to give up voluntarily or accept restrictions on their freedoms in return for a putative security. In some senses I am disgusted at the speed with which people seem willing to abase themselves before State security institutions or offer themselves up as slaves on the altar of security before the Moloch-figure of the State. For the even the fiction of the Liberal state, based on authority and coercion to be formally true; one would expect a high level of symbolic resistance by its supporters and self-professed followers. Yet these are the very individuals who seem eager to rush headlong into a maze of restrictive and rigid rules and procedures, which surrender these freedoms. In fact where resistance has come, it has been from the discordant and fragmented Left, nascent Libertarian groups and the oppositional coalitions of Environmentalists, anti-capitalists, anti-Globalisation protestors – interestingly none of these groups with the exception of the Libertarians can be said to have a classic Liberal faith in the Civil Liberties guaranteed by Liberal Democracy and in fact many of them have explicitly based their politics on exposing the hypocrisy of such notions during times of prosperity and peace. One is reminded of Dostoyevsky's dictum that if you give a weak man his Freedom, he will hand it back to you in Chains. In many senses giving up these freedoms will not defeat terrorism or have much functional utility at all; in fact a good case can be made that many of these measures will actually impede effective counter-terrorist operations and tactics by overloading the system responses and producing excess white noise. Therefore there is no rationality of governance at work here; but rather returning to Bataille’s idea of the role of Sacrifice and the Symbolic Other. As Bataille outlines in his work on the theory of religion; the function of Sacrifice in many early societies was not to obtain the putative object-desire of the Sacrifice from the Symbolic Other – usually a Divinity but to maintain the fiction that the Symbolic Other had the power to grant such a wish if it so desired. The true purpose of the Sacrifice was to mask the impotence of the Symbolic Other, which would have otherwise undermined the basis of the Social Order, and revealed the Abyss that exists where the Symbolic Other is meant to be. From this the true purpose behind the worrying eagerness of many in our Liberal democratic societies to sacrifice their freedoms, is precisely to mask the impotence of the State in dealing with such incidents of terrorism; they are mechanism by which people can assure themselves that actually sacrificing liberties that they value will be a vital contribution towards defeating the Terrorist Other – for after all if it was the very openness of our societies that made us such easy targets, it is convenient to assume that removing this openness will insulate us from such future attacks. This serves to mystify the real basis which generates antagonism such as the Political Economy of desire which generates uneven forms of international development, the poor management of foreign policy by many Democratic states, running counter to many formal democratic ideals and the unstable nature of Capital accumulation in many of the growth centres of the global economy.

2) Proceeding from Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon and how it can be used as a metaphor to mount a surveillance even under nominally Liberal regimes; many of the obvious points that can be made in connection with the current rollback of civil liberties by the Security State are easy to make: eg the way in which at-first-glance harmless techniques of surveillance like CCTV meant for our protection from urban crime can just as easily be turned against us when there is a more fundamental threat to the polity. In many ways the game of the War-On-Terror we are seeing today has already been played out in a prototyped fashion earlier in the US. Much of the rhetoric, the Conservative bias in interpreting Nationalism and security concerns as the cornerstone of foreign policy were first mounted in a more hesitant and coded fashion in the Reagan regime – Reagan’s Drug Tsar, Bennet, headed the War-On-Drugs, suggesting on Television Public Executions for Drug-dealers as an appropriate form of punishment (thereby conveniently ignoring the role various apparatuses of the US state such as the FBI played in flooding black urban neighbourhoods with drugs as a way of undermining Black Power movements and the CIA using income derived from drug smuggling as a way of raising finance and evading Congressional controls on their operational freedom); the vicious demonisation of Khomeini in the American Media and the traumatic representations of the Iranian Revolution (again ignoring the role US support played in propping up the autocratic and savage rule of the Shah, described by Jimmy Carter as “a man of Peace” - is this not a sick prefirguring of the way Bush would later descirbe Ariel Sharon as a Man of Peace!) in a time when Saddam’s lack of democratic credentials or appalling human rights records were no objection to him playing the role of the Western-basked strongman to counter the Iranian threat. The ease with which such representations can now be elided to portray Saddam as the Dictator of the moment who must be stopped; reflect the pervasive control of the Panopticon which controls us while making us unaware of our own bondage. The modern Matrix. As Vikash, points out, having Gore as President instead of Bush would only have made a marginal difference; the Panopticon would have had another Watcher in the Tower but the basic structure of surveillance and control would still be in place. However, a Lacanian spin on this interpretation offers an even more disturbing view; in this line of argument all attempts to resist the Panopticon Gaze or destroy it are doomed to failure because it is precisely the Gaze emanating from the Panopticon, which produces the Subject. It creates the conditions for the Subject’s self-consciousness while at the same time binding it in a wider structure of control; in this sense we whatever our conscious intentions, offer ourselves up to this Gaze. We deceive ourselves by trying to escape the Gaze or trying to destroy/occupy the Tower; as the withdrawal of the Gaze will lead to anxiety and fragmentation. The role of ideology is precisely to obscure and hide this unpleasant fact from our self-awareness; we mis-recognise systematically the chains of our own bondage in this manner when we assure ourselves that we live in Liberal societies where even if our freedoms are withdrawn they are only done so temporarily and will be restored to us. This is a bondage and slavery in which we are in reality unwilling to escape and in which we are complicit. A real move towards freedom must come from a re-engineering of the basis for our own self-knowledge and consciousness.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:35 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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