Latin America and the Arab World
August 5, 2008
Tariq Ali addressed a Sydney Ideas audience, with a lecture on lessons for the Middle East from Latin America, entitled Latin America and the Arab World: Resistance and Occupation. While one region serves to some degree as a good model of regional autonomy and has broken away from becoming a laboratory of neoliberalism, the other is struggling less successfully, so far, against the designs of neoconservatism.
Tariq Ali, Resistance and Occupation: Download Audio
August 5, 2008 at 6:31 am
It is funny… that the same democratic bourgeois institutions that are criticized so much in these types of works are precisely the ones that allowed people such Hugo Chavez, Lula, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega and Rafael Correa o tget into power. Liberal democracy is a powerful force… isn’t it? Perhaps that is what the Middle East needs.
August 5, 2008 at 10:34 am
I quite agree.
The real title of the lecture should be “The surrender of the Western Left”.As he says in the mid80s the Left gave up, its as simple and complicated as that.It gave up because it was never up to the task in the first place because it was always concerned with a narrow wealth distribution among the colonials and not universal equal rights for all.
The movements in South America and the Islamic world are neither left or right but genuine National Liberation Movements.This is a very important point in that these movements are not dogmatic , whilst the euro-left is.They are a success story, the euro-left is a failure.
A Dogma laden analysis of non-Dogmatic entities is always going to miss the mark.This makes the analysis by european intellectuals of these regions one dimension short of a full load.
The various anecdotes remarked apoun( The Bugler;the chair-burning woman ; the kids) are hardly marxian intellectual shock-troops , but a day to day example of national liberation.
It is completely wrong to have the premise that the Islamic world is strugling “less” successfully than South America.Algeria and Palestine are classic examples of how a South American style democractic change in governance had been completely circumvented by brazen support for Military intervention both domestically and externally , when required.
Liberal democracy would be well used to make the middle east a powerful self-determining powerful force , which is exactly why we have the Gaza situation or the Mubarak/Husseins or foreign occupying armies to deny this right.
It is also a very false premise that South America have broken away from the neo-liberal agenda, the clash between the Monroe Doctrine and self-determination is very much at a crossroads and can still go either way , as stated, the loyalty of Trade Unions and Doctors can go either way.If anything the Islamic world may be more piece-meal , but in the long term a freer zone than South America.