Who Is Responsible? An Interview with

Fred Halliday*

with Danny Postel

Who Is Responsible? An Interview with Fred Halliday* with Danny Postel Click here for Printer-Friendly Format Danny Postel: You were involved with New Left Review for 15 years but moved away from their worldview. What is your opinion now of where your former comrades are “at”? I’m thinking particularly of your old friend Tariq Ali, whose international popularity has soared since 9/11. Fred Halliday: I do not now share the major political orientations of the New Left Review. I resigned in 1983, after one of the journal’s periodic internal disputes. I find the direction they’ve gone most recently, in the last five to ten years, very disturbing, particularly around the issue of rights. But Tariq and I have known each other for more than 40 years. We were students together in the ’60s. We were active in the opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. And we’ve continued to cross paths in the British Left context. About 20 years ago I said to Tariq that God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, “One of you is to go the left, and one of you is to go to the right.” The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself. And Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it. Danny Postel: What exactly were you saying? Fred Halliday: My view is that the kind of position which the New Left Review and Tariq have adopted in terms of the conflict in the Middle East is an extremely reactionary, right-wing one. It starts with Afghanistan. To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century. It was the kitchen in which the contradictions of the contemporary world, and many of the violent evils of the century, were cooked and then spread out. Just as Italian and German fascism trained in Spain for the broader conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean,the militant jihadi Islamists, of whom bin Laden was a part, received their training, their primal experiences, in Afghanistan. They have been carrying out this broad jihad across the Middle East and elsewhere ever since, including, of course, the attacks of September 11th. You cannot understand this unless you go back to Afghanistan in the 1980s. But who was responsible? Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Read Bob Woodward’s book on Casey, The Veil, or Steven Cole’s book on Afghanistan, Ghost Wars. The U.S. was deeply implicated. My view is that anybody who could not see that issue then, or in retrospect, is objectively on the Right. And I think Tariq is objectively on the Right. He’s colluded with the most reactionary forces in the region, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. He has given his rhetorical support to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq—who have no interest in democracy or in progress for the people of Iraq whatsoever, whether it’s the Baathists, with their record of 30 years of dictatorship, or the foreign Sunnis with their own authoritarian project. The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah.

I was absolutely opposed to any support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which I regarded as a reactionary Islamist project. I had plenty of criticisms of the Afghan Communist regime, but I thought they should remain and reform, and there should be a negotiated withdrawal of the Soviet forces. Tariq’s position, on the other hand, was: troops out of Afghanistan, period. In a British context, the analogy is troops out of Ireland, which I also disagree with. If I had to sum up what is for me the bedrock, personal, political experience, it is the Irish question. I grew up in Ireland. I think troops out of Ireland was a completely irresponsible slogan, just as I think troops out of Afghanistan was an irresponsible slogan.

Scottish Marxist called Bill Warren, who wrote a book called Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism.

there are two very important theses in Huntington which merit discussion calmly and in their own right, but not in the context in which he’s presented them. One, which he takes as axiomatic and is absolutely central to his work, is the proposition that states necessarily conflict because we live in an anarchical world. He doesn’t waste much time on this in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, but it’s an underlying principle. His starting point isn’t really the clash of civilizations but the idea that conflict determines international relations. It’s a core assumption of realpolitik and one of the pillars on which the book rests. It’s a highly contestable proposition. I do not see the world as necessarily in conflict in this way.

The index attempts to measure how well countries use their resources to deliver longer lives, greater physical well-being and satisfaction. It finds that true happiness can be had on the Pacific island of Vanuatu which comes out as No 1.

By contrast the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations, whose leaders gather for their annual summit in St Petersburg this weekend, languish near the bottom of the list. The host, Russia, comes in at No 172 out of 178, followed by the United States at 150 and France and 128. The UK comes in at 108 - just above Laos, but below Libya.

The tip off was when I looked at the performance of the different S&P 500 sectors. I noticed that health care -- i.e. the 56 medical-related stocks in the index -- had the second-worst return of all, posting a 5% loss in the quarter just ended. Only technology (which investors these days are treating as just another big cyclical capital goods industry) did worse, with a 9.6% loss.

Humanity in decay and the natural world in splendor

Global Culture – Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel

Cameron Sinclair

Kendall Anderson has spent the last 3 years opening a lens to abandonment, decay and industrial mayhem in Canada (with the occational visit to the US). The photographs are stunning and make me think of the great work of Ed Burtynsky. Both photographers paint a visual reminder of the effects we have on this earth.

Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.