Immanuel Wallerstein on Libya

Here's a short excerpt from a new piece by Wallerstein:

There is so much hypocrisy and so much confused analysis about what is going on in Libya that one hardly knows where to begin. The most neglected aspect of the situation is the deep division in the world left. Several left Latin American states, and most notably Venezuela, are fulsome in their support of Colonel Qaddafi. But the spokespersons of the world left in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and indeed North America, decidedly don’t agree.

Hugo Chavez’s analysis seems to focus primarily, indeed exclusively, on the fact that the United States and western Europe have been issuing threats and condemnations of the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi, Chavez, and some others insist that the western world wishes to invade Libya and “steal” Libya’s oil. The whole analysis misses entirely what has been happening, and reflects badly on Chavez’s judgment – and indeed on his reputation with the rest of the world left.

Read the rest here.

Max Forte channels H.L. Mencken re: Libya

I'm not going to ruin it for all three of you who read this site. Just go check out this post by Max Forte over at the all-nuanced edition of Zero Anthropology. Here is a selection from one of the choice bits:

As observers of the complexities around the social negotiation of constructed meanings, it would do us well to remember that democracy is inscribed as a gesture of erasure, that human rights exist as an absence through an erasure that is the sign of their own creation. What we urgently need then are less of the over-determined portrayals of reality that lead to debased forms of point scoring– “dictator!” “murderer! “bastard!”–and more sophisticated treatments of the contingency of discourse, while tacking back to the free floating signifiers that constitute the flows of democracy instantiated in the reflexive negotiation of identity best understood as friction where the practice of inscription is embodied but ever perched on the border with the simulacra of memory qua narrative.

I think I am going to put "simulacra of memory qua narrative" on some academic t-shirts and see if I can cash in on this while the fire is still hot. Nuance, after all, is in.*

*If this post doesn't make sense, that's ok.