Eddie Aikau was born in 1946, and grew up with his five siblings in a Chinese graveyard in Pauoa Valley, on Oahu. Hawaiians of Chinese ancestry have lived in Hawaii for more than two hundred years, though most showed up in the mid-to-late nineteenth century to work on booming sugar and pineapple plantations. Pops Aikau and his kids maintained the cemetery grounds, digging up old bones and placing them in a mausoleum. The close-knit Aikau family spent most of their free time in the ocean. Diving, fishing, and paddleboarding animated a day-to-day existence of near poverty. As they became more proficient in the waves, Eddie and his brother Clyde started surfing with the native Hawaiian beach boys who partied with tourists and flirted with divorcées on the pristine beaches of Waikiki. Hawaiians have been surfing for more than a thousand years. There are legends and prayers dedicated to surfing, and the practice deeply influenced and reflected Hawaiians’ social status. In Waves of Resistance, a groundbreaking study of the relationship between surfing, Hawaiian identity, and the movement for native sovereignty, historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker identifies a “culture of respect and exchange” on the beaches of Hawaii.

more from Nicole Pasulka at The Believer here.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

LONDON — To stroll out of Carlton Gardens into the elegant confines of the Royal Society is to find a trove of centuries-old wonders, from Sir Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope to the first electric machine to fantastical illustrated catalogs of fish and birds. Then you enter the sunlight-suffused office of the society’s president, Sir Paul Nurse. With his spiky mass of white hair, broad nose, ready smile and thick work boots, he looks the part of old-fashioned knight of science ready to tramp through the fens. But this Nobel Prize winner in medicine offers a very 21st-century lament. “Policy debate these days involves trying to rubbish the science, and that is dangerous,” Dr. Nurse says. “Global warming denialists, those who oppose genetically modified crops and vaccinations, or the teaching of evolution: their trick is treat scientific argument as if it’s a political argument, and cherry-pick data.”

Dr. Nurse feels this danger more passionately than most, for the society he presides over was the crucible of the scientific revolution that formed the modern world. The society conducts studies, consults on government panels and has 1,450 fellows, about 80 of them Nobel winners. Yet theirs is, at times, an embattled world.

More here.

Martin Amis in the New York Times Book Review:

When, in 1960, Anthony Burgess sat down to write “A Clockwork Orange,” we may be pretty sure that he had a handful of certainties about what lay ahead of him. He knew the novel would be set in the near future (and that it would take the standard science-fictional route, developing, and fiercely exaggerating, current tendencies). He knew his vicious antihero, Alex, would narrate, and that he would do so in an argot or idiolect the world had never heard before (he eventually settled on a blend of Russian, Romany and rhyming slang). He knew it would have something to do with Good and Bad, and Free Will. And he knew, crucially, that Alex would harbor a highly implausible passion: an ecstatic love of classical music.

We see the wayward brilliance of that last decision when we reacquaint ourselves, after half a century, with Burgess’ leering, sneering, sniggering, sniveling young sociopath (a type unimprovably caught by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s uneven but justly celebrated film). “It wasn’t me, brother, sir” Alex whines at his social worker, who has hurried to the local jailhouse: “Speak up for me, sir, for I’m not so bad.” But Alex is so bad; and he knows it. The opening chapters of “A Clockwork Orange” still deliver the shock of the new: a red streak of gleeful evil.

More here.

Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books:

A Kashmiri lawyer rang me last week in an agitated state. Had I heard about the latest tragedies in Kashmir? I had not. He was stunned. So was I when he told me in detail what had been taking place there over the last three weeks. As far as I could see, none of the British daily papers or TV news bulletins had covered the story; after I met him I rescued two emails from Kashmir informing me of the horrors from my spam box. I was truly shamed. The next day I scoured the press again. Nothing. The only story in the Guardian from the paper’s Delhi correspondent – a full half-page – was headlined: ‘Model’s death brings new claims of dark side to India’s fashion industry’. Accompanying the story was a fetching photograph of the ill-fated woman. The deaths of (at that point) 11 young men between the ages of 15 and 27, shot by Indian security forces in Kashmir, weren’t mentioned. Later I discovered that a short report had appeared in the New York Times on 28 June and one the day after in the Guardian; there has been no substantial follow-up. When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran.

On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. After a photograph was published in the Kashmiri press, thousands defied the police and joined his funeral procession the next day, chanting angry slogans and pledging revenge.

More here.

The River

Earth-colored water hesitates, flows
I realize it is a river
The descendant of formless underground dwellers,
the water is heading toward the sea, that much I know
but I don’t know when and how it welled up

As the train crosses the river a young woman next to me yawns
There is something welling up, too, from the shadowy depth of her mouth
Suddenly I realize my brain is more dull-witted than my flesh

Feeling uneasy that I, the flesh, riding a train,
am made mostly of water
I, the brain, prop myself up with words

Sometime in a distant past, somewhere in a distant place
words were much less voluminous, but
their ties to the nether world were perhaps much stronger

Water remains on this planet
morphing into seas, clouds, rains and ice
Words, too, cling to this planet
morphing into speeches, poems, contracts and treaties

I, too, cling to this planet

by Shuntaro Tanikawa
from Watashi (I Myself)
publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo, 2007
translation: Takako Lento, 2011

Dear Reader,

We are very pleased to announce a collaboration with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to our audience quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice.

DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Their work is by its nature confidential and therefore not well known to the public. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.

DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.

In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One author will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.

For the first symposium the topic is whether military intervention is a desirable and viable means to end human rights violations. This is a particularly timely subject because of the ongoing international debate on how to end the recent turmoil in Syria.

The distinguished participants in our first symposium are:

• David Petrasek: Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International affairs,
  University of Ottawa, formerly Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, has worked extensively on human rights, humanitarian and conflict resolution issues, including for Amnesty International (1990-96), for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-98), for the International Council on Human Rights Policy (1998-02), and as Director of Policy at the HD Centre (2003-07). He has taught international human rights and/or humanitarian law courses at the Osgoode Hall Law School, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at Lund University, Sweden, and at Oxford University.
• Gareth Evans: Australian Foreign Minister (1988-96) and President of the International Crisis Group (2000-09), co-chaired the International Commission on State Sovereignty (2001), is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, and is the author of The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution Press 2008, 2009). He is Chancellor of The Australian National University.
• Kenneth Roth: Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations. Roth has also served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations. You may follow him on Twitter: @KenRoth

I would like to thank the participants as well as Fleur Ravensbergen and Amanda Beugeling of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposia has been designed by Amanda Beugeling.

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Yours,

S. Abbas Raza

NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research) toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.

THE SYMPOSIUM

[Click the links below to read the essays.]

1. The New Interventionism – Promise and Reality by David Petrasek
2. Mass Atrocity Crimes Are Everybody's, Not Nobody's, Business by Gareth Evans
3. Stopping an Occasional Genocide is Better than None by Kenneth Roth
4. Further Thoughts on the New Interventionism by David Petrasek

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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium on this post. Thank you.

by David Petrasek

The news is alarming: whole families killed in the mountain villages near Lebanon and massacres in Damascus; sectarian clashes between Christian, Alawite and Sunni communities risk a descent into full-scale civil war. The French are demanding intervention, and together with the British
threatening to dispatch warships to the Syrian coast; they seek an international mandate to do so. The Russians, wary of western plans in a region where their own influence is waning, are loath to agree. The Turks are anxious about the escalating violence, but ill-equipped to respond on their own.

Syria, in the summer of 2012? No, the Ottoman Syrian provinces – in 1860!

Thousands were killed in the clashes in 1860, and European newspapers printed lurid articles describing the violence against Christians. British and French objectives in the region were above all to extend their influence, lest the Russians fill the vacuum created by weakening Ottoman rule. The eventual French intervention, however, of several thousand troops, backed by the European powers, was justified in humanitarian terms – to protect innocent Christian lives. The French action is often referred to as the first modern example of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention.

There are, of course, important differences between the events of 1860 and a possible intervention to address the violence in Syria today. Recalling these events, however, reminds us that urge to intervene forcefully to protect innocents abroad is hardly new. Much is made of 24/7 news cycles, and the wonders of the Internet. But already in 1860, the public in Europe could be moved to outrage by newspaper accounts of atrocities in foreign lands.

If the impulse to intervene to protect innocents is not new, neither is the penchant to do so by invoking international law or moral arguments that appeal to the preservation of life or freedom. Just war theory is well-grounded in the law of nations. And armed interventions to seize colonies, or, more recently, to counter (or support) communist, nationalist or anti-colonial insurgency, have often invoked as rationales in their favour the overthrow of tyranny and despotism and putting and end to the suffering of innocents.

So what’s different about the debate today over a possible intervention in Syria, or indeed about NATO’s actual intervention in Libya in 2011? To some critics, not much; it’s just old wine in new bottles. They believe powerful states have invested the old interventionism with a new respectability, under the guise of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This doctrine, grounded in universal human rights, holds that when states are unable or unwilling to prevent mass atrocity within their borders, the UN has a duty to step in — including as a last resort by authorising the intervention of foreign troops.[1]To its most strident critics, R2P undermines the independence of states and is a cover for NATO (or western) interventionism.

Read more »

by Gareth Evans

David Petrasek is not alone in his anxiety that the new ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine will be misused to the point of doing more harm than good. His arguments are well articulated and need to be taken seriously by R2P advocates. But in seeking to answer them, what I will be defending is the R2P norm that has originated and evolved over the last decade, not the miscellany of different positions that he lumps together as the ‘new interventionism’.

Petrasek’s ‘new interventionists’ seem to embrace not only R2P supporters who understand and accept that coercive military intervention is defensible only in the most extreme, exceptional and clearly defined circumstances, but also latter-day enthusiasts for the kind of ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘right to intervene’ doctrine re-popularised, after a century’s lapse, by Bernard Kouchner in the 1990s, and more recently embraced by commentators like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is a fine scholar but has rarely seen an argument she didn't like for shedding blood in a good cause.

The difference between the ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the new R2P norm unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit really is crucial. It’s not just a matter of acknowledging, as Petrasek does, that R2P is about much more than just the use of force, focusing as it does on preventive strategies, both long and short term, plus a whole suite of non-military reaction options (including diplomatic persuasion, targeted sanctions and threat of international criminal prosecution) should prevention fail.

The more important point is that R2P approaches coercive military force itself with a completely different mindset, one much less enthusiastic about military solutions. And it does so both because R2P advocates are both acutely conscious of the demonstrable risks associated with too cavalier an approach to military instruments, and determined to achieve and maintain an international consensus – sadly lacking in the past – that mass atrocity crimes are everybody’s, not nobody’s, business.

Read more »

by Kenneth Roth

David Petrasek argues that humanitarian intervention—the use of military force to stop mass slaughter—risks becoming a “Frankenstein” because some governments that intervene do so inconsistently or out of self-interest. I see the matter differently. I assume that all governments act inconsistently and for reasons of self-interest. Yet because I am appalled at the idea of doing nothing when we have the capacity to stop mass slaughter, I prefer a tainted humanitarian intervention to the supposed purity of passivity and indifference.

But before even going there, it’s worth pointing out that things are not nearly as bad as Petrasek suggests in his essay. Part of the problem is that he jumps repeatedly from situations of mass slaughter, which cry out for humanitarian intervention, to serious but lesser abuses, which do not. The breadth of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, or R2P, facilitates this sleight of hand. It addresses a range of crimes in addition to mass slaughter, including ethnic cleansing and war crimes, but it doesn’t require military force in all such cases. Rather, it contemplates a range of interventions, including diplomacy and sanctions. Because military intervention, by definition, entails killing people, most R2P proponents would advocate military force to halt only large-scale slaughter.

By that standard, most of the cases in which Petrasek faults the world for not intervening militarily are inappropriate for such intervention. The mass displacement from the Houthi rebellion in Yemen or the violent repression of Burma’s Rohingya Muslims are awful human rights abuses that should be vigorously opposed, but they don’t justify the killing that is inherent in military intervention.

Moreover, a high level of killing is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for humanitarian intervention. It is also important to determine that other reasonable options short of military force have been tried or would be futile, that military intervention is reasonably likely to do more good than harm, and that the intervention will be conducted in a way that respects international humanitarian law.

Read more »

by David Petrasek

Ken Roth and Gareth Evans are eager to defend a doctrine that would permit States acting under UN authority – and in narrowly defined cases – to intervene in other countries to prevent or stop mass atrocities. So am I, and in this, at least, we are in full agreement. Where we part company, I think, is in the degree to which we believe that R2P, as it stands, provides such a doctrine – or that there are sufficient safeguards in place against its misuse.

Let’s be clear. One of the most important achievements in establishing the UN was to outlaw war except in self-defence. Unless done to thwart an actual or impending military attack, any use of force in (or over) the territory of another state amounts to aggression – an international crime. The sole exception is when the Security Council permits the use of force to respond to a “threat to the peace”. Widespread attacks against civilians might trigger such a decision. However, because humanitarian intervention is an exception to the general rule it is an obvious temptation; so much so, that States may be inclined to act under international mandates that fall short of Security Council approval.

Both Roth and Evans argue we can distinguish R2P from past interventionism and that the risks of its misuse can be managed. They do so by pointing to several criteria that are intended to limit R2P’s application. Yet such criteria (last resort, proportionality, etc.) are neither new and distinct to R2P, nor very helpful in placing firm constraints on its application. Philosophers who debated just war doctrine centuries ago set very similar criteria (although the ‘just cause’ trigger for intervention wasn’t expressed in terms of human rights abuse), and more recently international lawyers have debated these and other criteria for many decades.

Read more »

Adam Kostko in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simplyŽižek!), and surely counts as one of the world’s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When Žižek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of “ideology critique,” a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century.

“Ideology” is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as “deconstruction” means little more than “detailed analysis” in popular usage, so “ideology” tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as Žižek argued in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is not to be found in our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value.

More here.

Sam Sacks reviews Danilo Kiš's Psalm 44, in the WSJ [h/t: Hong-An Tran]:

One of the less admirable affectations in the republic of letters is the tendency to borrow political language to speak of matters of aesthetics. Thus you'll often hear brave-sounding complaints against the tyranny of traditional narrative and the suppression of experimental forms.

Such armchair posturing seems especially flimsy set alongside the fiction of Serbian writer Danilo Kiš. Born in 1935 and raised amid the twin maelstroms of the Nazi and Soviet genocides, Kiš came to a European literature battered from decades of misuse as a tool for political power. “Central European writers,” he wrote in a 1986 essay, “have long been caught between two kinds of reductionism: ideological and nationalistic.”

Kiš's achievement was to create fiction that was not only free from such corruptions but that sought, through a subversive documentary style, to reclaim history from the propagandizers. His greatest works, the nonpareil story collections “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich” (1976) and “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” (1983), are compendiums of the crimes that the Soviet Union and its Western sympathizers had hoped to whitewash. By the time of his death from cancer in 1989, at the age of 54, he had produced a meticulous body of work that conjoined political protest with literary ingenuity.

Dalkey Archive Press has now brought forth three unfamiliar Kiš works—two early novels that haven't before been translated into English and a selection of posthumously published stories. They further illuminate a writing life doggedly devoted to the quest for stylistic innovations to rejuvenate literature after its paralyzing association with agitprop and government censorship.

Sasha Issenberg in the NYT:

It becomes popular around this time of year to lament the fact that media coverage treats the presidential campaign as little more than a “horse race.” Journalists, this line of argument goes, choose to fixate on which candidate is a superior campaigner or savvier strategist, not on who has sounder ideas or is better prepared to govern. From time to time, the journalists themselves concede that to maintain daily or hourly tension in the contests they promote, they have little choice but to elevate minor poll shifts into major developments.

But the reality about horse-race journalism is far more embarrassing to the press and ought to be just as disappointing to the readers who consume our reporting. The truth is that we aren’t even that good at covering the horse race. If the 2012 campaign has been any indication, journalists remain unable to keep up with the machinations of modern campaigns, and things are likely only to get worse.

“My view is that there’s nothing that’s secret in campaigns anymore — but that doesn’t mean everything is understandable in a campaign,” says Terry Nelson, who served as John McCain’s campaign manager in 2008. “The ability of campaigns to run circles around journalists in some places is strong, and it’s not healthy.”

I covered the 2008 election for The Boston Globe, filing articles that I hoped would rise above the superficial and ephemeral poll-driven reporting that I had been trained to disdain. But after spending the last two years reporting on the scientific revolution that is quietly reshaping politics, I realized how much of the story my colleagues and I had missed.

Tamara Nopper in New Inquiry:

[A]s suggested in the iconic photograph of him sporting a black beret and sunglasses, Aoki was perceived by many of us who didn’t know him as cool, hip, and most importantly, politically down with the Black struggle. And yes, he was also unfortunately idolized for not being an “emasculated” (read nerdy or gay) Asian man—a homophobic and sexist preoccupation among many Asian Americans and our “allies.” And some of us liked that Aoki was known for providing guns and weapons training to the BPP. While there is afoot an intellectual effort to prove that the BPP was more than just about using guns, Aoki had passed a particular litmus test for non-Black allies of the Black struggle—a willingness to use guns or supply weapons in defense of Black people’s freedom and thus, purportedly be more willing to put one’s life on the line. Simply put, Aoki was, for some of us, our Asian American John Brown.

And yet Aoki was not John Brown. He was not white. He and his family had been incarcerated in an internment camp during WWII. As a youth he had been in a gang and in trouble with the law. His experiences with Blacks were not isolated to political organizing; he had grown up in West Oakland andimages of Aoki during his youth show him hanging out with African Americans. Taken together, Aoki was a working-class Asian American man in a white supremacist society, whose biography makes for an even more seductive interracial coalition story. He was not the border crosser of the white anti-racist variety who used his dominant group member status and racial privilege to paternalistically help Blacks. Instead, for many of us, Aoki was an anti-model minority in the crudest sense: a working-class, socially rebellious Asian American who politically claimed his minority status and committed his entire adult life to radical activism.

Aoki, then, was the perfect hero for leftist Asian Americans as his biography spoke to two simultaneous desires that animate contemporary Asian American scholarship and activism. The first is being acknowledged by other people of color that we are racial minorities and not white or honorary whites. The second is proving to Blacks that we do not hate them or have structural power over them.

Frank Pasquale reviews Robert Shiller's Finance and the Good Society, in Boston Review (the book's introduction can be found here):

Shiller brims with ideas for redirecting financial ingenuity to real-world problems. For instance, he endorses “social policy bonds,” which would allow governments to raise money while encouraging entrepreneurs to find creative ways to meet public goals. (The bonds would pay out more than a baseline return if the bond purchaser, say, reduced recidivism among a set of prisoners.) He believes that “even the most personal problems” can benefit from a financial engineer’s precision, since “finding a match between husband and wife is like finding a trade in a financial market.” For Shiller, whether in love or money, quants do it better.

His ambitions soar beyond the pragmatic into the panegyric. “Some of our greatest human achievements have their origins in . . . self promotion and the acquisition of wealth,” he reminds us. He praises the aesthetics of finance—the elegance of its theorems, and the beauty in “what it creates.” Contemplating how finance “facilitates all the day-to-day activities that constitute our working lives,” Shiller is so moved that he quotes Whitman’s “Song for Occupations”: “In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments, / And find the eternal meanings.” He believes that leading CEOs and bankers share important similarities with poets, artists, and philosophers, whose vision can shape a “good society.”

What exactly do the creative geniuses of finance contribute? Shiller takes for granted that most financiers play a constructive role in the economy. For example, consider his discussion of finance’s share of GDP. He reports “the gross value added by financial corporate business was 9.1 percent of U.S. GDP in 2010.” But why not say that some firms “extracted” value, rather than “added” it? Think back to the last time you were charged a late fee on a credit card by a bank that already takes a cut of every purchase you make. Or the endless series of fees involved in a mortgage transaction, or the oft-mysterious charges that eat away at 401(k) accounts. How much value are the professionals pocketing these fees really creating, and how much of their role is explained by arcane law or custom, by their leverage over their debtors, or by their bosses’ power over networks of financial transfers?

Shiller endorses mild consumer-protection remedies for some of these practices. But he never seriously examines how much of bankers’ pay comes from skimming exorbitant fees off of normal economic activity, front-running, accounting shenanigans, and the like. He is untroubled by the fact that financiers as a class are so much better compensated than, say, scientists, let alone poets and philosophers. A Ph.D. cancer researcher with ten years of experience tends to make about $110,000 to $160,000 annually; a banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions, about $2 million. Top hedge fund managers make billions of dollars annually. The disparity fails to rankle Shiller, since the “scientists are mostly living comfortably doing what they really want to do.”